The Boy blubbered, the Young Girl
changed color, and looked as if she would cry, and that was the last of
these interruptions.
I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it
answered all the purpose of "the previous question" in a deliberative
assembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little
engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that
threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her
small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed
to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into
the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all at
once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the
story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied me
of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very
little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from
that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a
jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party,
without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with
his popgun.
How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's audacious
contrivance for regulating our table-talk! Her brain is tired half the
time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to what a quieter person
would like well enough, or at least would not be annoyed by.
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