not talking at all, when suddenly she burst out laughing.

"Do you know what I have been doing?" she said. "I wanted to know who
that man is"--indicating a gentleman of peculiar appearance in the
crowd--"and I have been looking all over him for his number, that I
might hunt up his name in the catalogue!"

Her way of seeing analogies as plausible as the obvious relation of p
to pen, and of acting on wholly wrong conclusions deduced from most
unexceptionable premises, was another characteristic. She always blamed
her early education, or rather want of education, for it. "If I had
been taught to think," she said, "when my memory was being burdened
with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless scraps
of knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and
judge rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a
time, and when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some
Greek play, who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the
other would not speak as it would only poggle what was then clear to
him."

But in this Ideala was not quite fair to herself.

It was not always--although, unfortunately, it was oftenest at critical
moments--that she was beset with this inability to see more than one
side of a subject at a time. The odd thing about it was that one never
knew which side, the pathetic or the humorous, would strike her.
Generally, however, it was the one that related least to herself
personally. This self-forgetfulness, with a keen sense of the
ludicrous, led her sometimes, when she had anything amusing to relate,
to overlook considerations which would have kept other people silent.