“The art of the _raconteur_,” observed the Philosopher, “consists in avoiding the unessential. I have a friend who never yet to my knowledge reached the end of a story. It is intensely unimportant whether the name of the man who said the thing or did the deed be Brown or Jones or Robinson. But she will worry herself into a fever trying to recollect. ‘Dear, dear me!’ she will leave off to exclaim; ‘I know his name so well. How stupid of me!’ She will tell you why she ought to recollect his name, how she always has recollected his name till this precise moment. She will appeal to half the people in the room to help her. It is hopeless to try and induce her to proceed, the idea has taken possession of her mind. After a world of unnecessary trouble she recollects that it was Tomkins, and is delighted; only to be plunged again into despair on discovery that she has forgotten his address. This makes her so ashamed of herself she declines to continue, and full of self-reproach she retires to her own room. Later she re-enters, beaming, with the street and number pat. But by that time she has forgotten the anecdote.” “Well, tell us about your old lady, and what it was you said to her,” spoke impatiently the Girton Girl, who is always eager when the subject under discussion happens to be the imbecility or criminal tendency of the opposite sex. “I was at the age,” continued the Woman of the World, “when a young girl tiring of fairy stories puts down the book and looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day our _bonne_—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our _rue_, married only four years to a charming and devoted little wife, had run away and left her.