Mr. Dimple would ramble off into his genial forest of qualifications and brackets, and the minds of his hearers immediately left him; they thought of their homes, or their work, or the food they were eating, or of the clothes of some other person, or of some story they intended to tell when Mr. Dimple had done; and they came suddenly out of their dreams, to find Mr. Dimple yet labouring onward to his climax; and they said, with shame and mortification, “I have failed again,” and laughed very heartily at the wrong moment.

Yet people loved Mr. Dimple; and if it was impossible sometimes to deduce from what he actually said what it was he actually thought, one was often able to make a good guess on the assumption that he never wittingly said anything cruel or unkind or even mildly censorious to or about anybody.