designs! Presently he saw the helve, picked it up at once and turned it
over in his hands. I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense of
self-consciousness. I know how a poet must feel at hearing his first
poem read aloud by some other person who does not know its authorship. I
suffer and thrill with the novelist who sees a stranger purchase his
book in a book-shop. I felt as though I stood that moment before the
Great Judge.

Horace "hefted" it and balanced it, and squinted along it; he rubbed it
with his thumb, he rested one end of it on the floor and sprung it
roughly.

"David," he said severely, "where did you git this?"

Once when I was a boy I came home with my hair wet. My father asked:

"David, have you been swimming?"

I had exactly the same feeling when Horace asked his question. Now I am,
generally speaking, a truthful man. I have written a good deal about the
immorality, the unwisdom, the short-sightedness, the sinful wastefulness
of a lie. But at that moment, if Harriet had not been present--and that
illustrates one of the purposes of society, to bolster up a man's
morals--I should have evolved as large and perfect a prevarication as it
lay within me to do--cheerfully. But I felt Harriet's moral eye upon me:
I was a coward as well as a sinner. I faltered so long that Horace
finally looked around at me.

Horace has no poetry in his soul, neither does he understand the
philosophy of imperfection nor the art of irregularity.