 of waxwork never do; and that the women of
happy marriages do not; nor the women of holy nunneries; nor the women lucky in
their arts. It is a test of the civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to
the spectacle.
    Thousands have reflected on a Diarist's power to cancel our Burial Service.
Not alone the cleric's good work is upset by him, but the sexton's as well. He
howks the graves, and transforms the quiet worms, busy on a single poor
peaceable body, into winged serpents that disorder sky and earth with a deadly
flight of zig-zags, like military rockets, among the living. And if these are
given to cry too much, to have their tender sentiments considered, it cannot be
said that History requires the flaying of them. A gouty Diarist, a sheer gossip
Diarist, may thus, in the bequest of a trail of reminiscences, explode our
temples (for our very temples have powder in store), our treasuries, our
homesteads, alive with dynamitic stuff; nay, disconcert our inherited
veneration, dislocate the intimate connexion between the tugged flaxen forelock
and a title.
    No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers. No blame whatever, one would
say, if he had been less copious, or not so subservient, in recording the lady's
utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be terse, quite spontaneous, as
this lady's assuredly was here and there, she is apt to spin it out of a museful
mind, at her toilette, or by the lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative;
admirers should beware of holding it up to the withering glare of print: she
herself, quoting an obscure maxim-monger, says of these lapidary sentences, that
they have merely »the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit,« and
tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides flattering the
world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are golden. Henry Wilmers
notes a multitude of them. »The talk fell upon our being creatures of habit, and
how far it was good: She said: - It is there that we see ourselves crutched
between love grown old and indifference ageing to love.« Critic ears not present
at the conversation catch an echo of maxims and aphorisms overchannel,
notwithstanding a feminine thrill in the irony of ageing to love. The quotation
ranks rather among the testimonies to her charm.
    She is fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence out
