“Are you positive you aren’t a man?” he would ask anxiously, and she would echo,

“Can it be possible you’re not a woman?” and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other’s sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once.

And so they would go on talking or, rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that “the biscuits ran out” has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one-syllabled writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)