Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/190

 tendency of the mind. Often in society, curiosity is but a kind of espionage; it is indisputably the handmaiden of gossip. But clothed in good manners, it passes as one of the excellences of human intercourse; and not infrequently it engenders scandal and brings about the ruin of an established home or fortune.

On the other hand, there is the individual that affects an incuriousness only to impress upon us a real, or to flaunt a fictitious, superiority. When one is well travelled, well read,—has had a varied and rich experience,—has tasted of all the cups and courses of life; is as familiar amidst the superstitious squalor of Calcutta as in the high-lackered halls of London or New York; is terribly at ease with the fallaheen of Egypt as with the dons of Oxford, one's curiosity is seldom moved. But even in its latencies and repressions, in its immobility, however serene, it can be provoking, irritating. And what is worse, it can be insincere.

The gentleman in the centre of the