must be going to have a fit of sickness, as the people say in the
country, or used to say. Those expressions often survive in the common
parlance long after the peculiar mental and moral conditions in which
they originated have passed away. They must once have been more
accurate than they are now. When one said 'fit of sickness' one must
have meant something specific; it would be interesting to know what.
Women use those expressions longer than men; they seem to be inveterate
in their nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in their nerves
rather than their brains."




IV.


Wanhope had that distant look in his eyes which warned his familiars of a
possible excursion, and I said, in the hope of keeping him from it, "Then
isn't there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to that in a
personification?"

"Ah, yes--a personification," he repeated with a freshness of interest,
which he presently accounted for. "The place they had taken was very
completely furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen and
silver; but what was more important to poor Ormond was the library, very
rich in the English classics, which appeared to go with the house. The
owner was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these were her
father's books. Mrs. Ormond said that her husband had the greatest
pleasure in them: their print, which was good and black, and their
paper, which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, which was tree