THE CURIOSITY OF THE OCCIDENTAL
drawing room, surrounded by a knot of admirers, has wonderful dignity and poise, is to the manner born. Yes, indeed. He is one of the celebrities of the day:—a poet, scholar, diplomat and an illustrious citizen of the Republic. But when you are relating in his presence some curious instance of racial degeneracy or superiority in the aborigines of Yucatan, or some idiomatic vernacular enormities of a religious revival in America, or some anthropologic anomalies in the Bulus of Central Africa, he listens patronizingly and nods with an all-knowing brow, to be sure; but when he gets back to his library, he will hasten, I promise you, to the dictionary or the encyclopedia to look up a word or a name he deliberately remembered which had escaped his circumambient comprehension. His lack of curiosity is commendable, indeed; but you wish, after having politely unbuttoned your mind and bowed before the image of his sublime reserve, that he would condescend at least to an interrogation.
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