"Because you think too much, Peter; you never open your lips without having first thought out just what you are going to say; you never do anything without having laboriously mapped it all out beforehand, that you may not outrage Peter Vibart's tranquillity by any impulsive act or speech. Oh! you are always thinking and thinking—and that is even worse than stirring, and stirring at your tea, as you are doing now." I took the spoon hastily from my cup, and laid it as far out of reach as possible. "If ever you should write the book you once spoke of, it would be just the very sort of book that I should—hate." "Why, Charmian?" "Because it would be a book of artfully turned phrases; a book in which all the characters, especially women, would think and speak and act by rote and rule—as according to Mr. Peter Vibart; it would be a scholarly book, of elaborate finish and care of detail, with no irregularities of style or anything else to break the monotonous harmony of the whole—indeed, sir, it would be a most unreadable book!" "Do you think so, Charmian?" said I, once more taking up the teaspoon. "Why, of course!" she answered, with raised brows; "it would probably be full of Greek and Latin quotations! And you would polish and rewrite it until you had polished every vestige of life and spontaneity out of it, as you do out of yourself, with your thinking and thinking." "But I never quote you Greek or Latin; that is surely something, and, as for thinking, would you have me a thoughtless fool or an impulsive ass?" "Anything rather than a calculating, introspective philosopher, seeing only the mote in the sunbeam, and nothing of the glory." Here she gently disengaged the teaspoon from my fingers and laid it in her own saucer, having done which she sighed, and looked at me with her head to one side. "Were they all like you, Peter, I wonder—those old philosophers, grim and stern, and terribly repressed, with burning eyes, Peter, and with very long chins? Epictetus was, of course!" "And you dislike Epictetus, Charmian?" "I detest him! He was just the kind of person, Peter, who, being unable to sleep, would have wandered out into a terrible thunderstorm, in the middle of the night, and, being cold and wet and clammy, Peter, would have drawn moral lessons, and made epigrams upon the thunder and lightning. Epictetus, I am quite sure, was a—person!" "He was one of the wisest, gentlest, and most lovable of all the Stoics!" said I. "Can a philosopher possibly be lovable, Peter?" Here I very absent-mindedly took up a fork, but, finding her eye upon me, laid it down again. "You are very nervous, Peter, and very pale and worn and haggard, and all because you habitually—overthink yourself; and indeed, there is something very far wrong with a man who perseveringly stirs an empty cup—with a fork!" And, with a laugh, she took my cup and, having once more refilled it, set it before me.