But his natural kindliness and geniality made him always try and please those who tried to please him, beautiful or the reverse, whether they succeeded or not; and he was just as popular with the ducks and geese as with the swans and peacocks and nightingales and birds of paradise. The dull, commonplace dames who prosed and buzzed and bored, the elderly intellectual virgins who knew nothing of life but what they had read—or written—in “Tendenz” novels, yet sadly rebuked him, more in sorrow than in anger, for this passage or that in his books, about things out of their ken altogether, etc.
His playful amenity disarmed the most aggressive bluestocking, orthodox or Unitarian, Catholic or Hebrew—radicals, agnostics, vegetarians, teetotalers, anti-vaccinationists, anti-vivisectionists—even ant
