She had
been busy with her catalogue, doing the pictures conscientiously, and
not talking at all, when suddenly she burst out laughing.
"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I wanted to know who
that man is"--indicating a gentleman of peculiar appearance in the
crowd--"and I have been looking all over him for his number, that I
might hunt up his name in the catalogue!"
Her way of seeing analogies as plausible as the obvious relation of p
to pen, and of acting on wholly wrong conclusions deduced from most
unexceptionable premises, was another characteristic. She always blamed
her early education, or rather want of education, for it. "If I had
been taught to think," she said, "when my memory was being burdened
with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless scraps
of knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and
judge rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a
time, and when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some
Greek play, who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the
other would not speak as it would only poggle what was then clear to
him.
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