Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/28

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ABOUT PEOPLE.

cicerone of their requirements, for each one stands as a whole, not as a collection of points with intervening spaces. Their conversation does not consist of social items or of literary gossip. Their ready cordiality, sympathy, grace, and proportion mark their outward presentment. We know them best by knowing that we ourselves are never so brilliant, so learned, or so happy as when with them. The reality in them is the substratum of the average man or woman, which can be refined by the furnace of life-experience into the purest human ore; and which makes him of humble appreciation able to cope with the man of scholarship. No conversation is so rich as that which caps the littérateur's and critic's reference with some bit of present, human fact.

It is this reality which makes average people so needful. As a rule they have not self-consciousness, — that venerable inheritance from American and English ancestry, — set

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