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Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 102 of 166 (61%)
education. All the humanities were taught in that bare dining-room
beside his gouty footstool. He was a piece of good advice; he was
himself the instance that pointed and adorned his various talk.
Nor could a young man have found elsewhere a place so set apart
from envy, fear, discontent, or any of the passions that debase; a
life so honest and composed; a soul like an ancient violin, so
subdued to harmony, responding to a touch in music - as in that
dining-room, with Mr. Hunter chatting at the eleventh hour, under
the shadow of eternity, fearless and gentle.

The second class of old people are not anecdotic; they are rather
hearers than talkers, listening to the young with an amused and
critical attention. To have this sort of intercourse to
perfection, I think we must go to old ladies. Women are better
hearers than men, to begin with; they learn, I fear in anguish, to
bear with the tedious and infantile vanity of the other sex; and we
will take more from a woman than even from the oldest man in the
way of biting comment. Biting comment is the chief part, whether
for profit or amusement, in this business. The old lady that I
have in my eye is a very caustic speaker, her tongue, after years
of practice, in absolute command, whether for silence or attack.
If she chance to dislike you, you will be tempted to curse the
malignity of age. But if you chance to please even slightly, you
will be listened to with a particular laughing grace of sympathy,
and from time to time chastised, as if in play, with a parasol as
heavy as a pole-axe. It requires a singular art, as well as the
vantage-ground of age, to deal these stunning corrections among the
coxcombs of the young. The pill is disguised in sugar of wit; it
is administered as a compliment - if you had not pleased, you would
not have been censured; it is a personal affair - a hyphen, A TRAIT
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