I have looked for
her name, but always in vain, among the attendants at the
rights-conventions, in the list of those good Americans presented at
court, among those skeleton names that appear as the remains of beauty
in the morning journals after a ball to the wandering prince, in the
reports of railway collisions and steamboat explosions. No news comes
of her. And so imperfect are our means of communication in this world
that, for anything we know, she may have left it long ago by some
private way.
IV
The lasting regret that we cannot know more of the bright, sincere,
and genuine people of the world is increased by the fact that they
are all different from each other. Was it not Madame de Sevigne who
said she had loved several different women for several different
qualities? Every real person--for there are persons as there are
fruits that have no distinguishing flavor, mere gooseberries--has a
distinct quality, and the finding it is always like the discovery of
a new island to the voyager. The physical world we shall exhaust
some day, having a written description of every foot of it to which
we can turn; but we shall never get the different qualities of people
into a biographical dictionary, and the making acquaintance with a
human being will never cease to be an exciting experiment.
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