To this finer penetration the humorous faculty adds a vision for relations which distinguishes the higher kind of judgment. What we call the ludicrous in character is, indeed, always to some extent a matter of relations. As implied above, it is the view of some trait set in a particular milieu which brings the smile. The hidden weakness may entertain because of its juxtaposition with something that {317} is worthy, or at least has an appearance of worth. In a certain kind of impulsive person, for example, there discloses itself to the humorous eye an almost admirable consistency in the recurring inconsistencies; while, on the other hand, in another sort of character, that eye will rather spy an inconsistency within the limits of a quality, as when a person, on the whole generous, lapses into a kind of niggardliness in certain small particulars of expenditure, as if to show that even a moral quality, firmly planted, needs the sunlight of intelligence. In many cases the entertainment in observing character comes, not so much through a perception of the juxtaposition of something worthy and something slightly unworthy, as through a detection of some discrepancy between the character and the _rôle_ assumed at the moment, as when a self-assertive sense of justice, in “a child of larger growth,” reveals itself in the quaint exaggeration of doing more than justice to oneself. No better terrain, indeed, for a chase after the imperfectly masked will be found than that of the manners of persons who are quite above suspicion of serious fault. Perhaps it is a certain kind of woman who shows the greatest skill in this humorous reading of character, as when she sets herself to decipher the palimpsest of manners in one educated rather late in life, detecting traces of the earlier cramped hand below the thin caligraphy of a later culture. To a finer perception of relations, again, must we ascribe the readiness to enjoy the large and variegated presentment of unsuitabilities of men to their circumstances. The situations in which the merry god, who seems to arrange the puppet show, often chooses to place us are pregnant of ironical suggestion to the contemplative eye of humour. The necessity of confronting what nature never intended {318} that we should confront makes us an amusing spectacle to the twinkling eyes above us. How delightful for example is the variety of social juxtaposition which brings embarrassment to the encounterers. When it is not accident but a man’s foolish impulse, unmindful of limitations of capability, which pushes him into the awkward situation, as when his civility plunges him into discourse in a foreign language with a fellow-traveller, or when the most undecided of men attempts to make a proposal of marriage, the value of the situation for the humorous observer is greatly enhanced.