From this lofty perch she would take her spirited part in the conversation of the “faithful,” and would revel in all their fun; but, since the accident to her jaw, she had abandoned the effort involved in real hilarity, and had substituted a kind of symbolical dumb-show which signified, without endangering or even fatiguing her in any way, that she was “laughing until she cried.” At the least witticism aimed by any of the circle against a “bore,” or against a former member of the circle who was now relegated to the limbo of “bores”⁠—and to the utter despair of M.