himself as well as the rest of us; but he dared not stop, I fancy, because he could think of nothing else to talk about. By the time he lose to go I was in a coma with words like Camden Hish Street, Prince of Wales Road and Britannia jostling each other in my brain.
Another boring form of conversation is that of the man who, when talking politics, trots out all the old threadbare3 arguments with the air of a person using them for the first time. I have been a bore of this kind myself. As a boy I was blind enough to regard Mr. Gladstone’s proposal of Home Rule for Ireland as bots dangerous and wicked4, and, whenever I met a great friend of mine who was a Home Ruler, I would drag the conversation round to the great theme. I shouted the wildest nonsense into his ear as I walked beside him in the streets, telling him with blazing eyes of all the good England had done to Ireland and yelling all the usual musty quotations from the Pre-Hone-Rule Gladstone and Sir William Hareourt. Not once did I use an original argument, for I knew none. I was merely an infuriated parrot, speaking out of the richest store of ignorance conceivable. Signs of distress on his patient face could not stop me; but one day, driven beyond endurance, he turned to me with a slight flush and said quietly: “My God, what a bore you are!” Now no one likes to be thought a bore, and it is difficult to go on arguing with a man who tells you that you are boring him. To realize that one is boring somebody is to become a pricked balloon. I certainly did. La Roche. Foueauld tells us that“we can forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore,” yet, after the first moment of shock, I never liked my friend the less for his candour5. Since then I must have bored many people; but outside the f***ly circle no one has since told me that I was boring them. I have to study the expression on their faces to know.
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