that Ppt is a Tory, I fancy she looks like one, and D a sort of trimmer."

But it is for Dingley separately that Swift endured a wild bird in his
lodgings. His man Patrick had got one to take over to her in Ireland.
"He keeps it in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter; but I say
nothing; I am as tame as a clout."

Forgotten Dingley, happy in this, has not had to endure the ignominy, in
a hundred essays, to be retrospectively offered to Swift as an unclaimed
wife; so far so good. But two hundred years is long for her to have gone
stripped of so radiant a glory as is hers by right. "Better, thanks to
MD's prayers," wrote the immortal man who loved her, in a private
fragment of a journal, never meant for Dingley's eyes, nor for Ppt's, nor
for any human eyes; and the rogue Stella has for two centuries stolen all
the credit of those prayers, and all the thanks of that pious
benediction.




PRUE


Through the long history of human relations, which is the history of the
life of our race, there sounds at intervals the clamour of a single voice
which has not the tone of oratory, but asks, answers, interrupts itself,
interrupts--what else? Whatever else it interrupts is silence; there are
pauses, but no answers. There is the jest without the laugh, and again
the laugh without the jest. And this is because the letters written by
Madame de Sevigne were all saved, and not many written to her; because