Watersprings by A.C. Benson — Read

Another small factor which caused Howard some discomfort was the conversation of the Vicar. This, at the first sight of Windlow, had been one of the salient features of the scene. It had been amusing to see the current of a human mind running so frankly open to inspection; and, moreover, the Vicar's constantly expressed deference for the exalted quality of Howard's mind and intellectual outfit, though it had not been seriously regarded, had at least an emollient effect. But it is one thing to sit and look on at a play and to be entertained by the comic relief of some voluble character, and quite another to encounter that volubility at full pressure in private life. There was a certain charm at first in the Vicar's inconsequence and volatility; but in daily intercourse the good man's lack of proportion, his indiscriminate interest in things in general, proved decidedly fatiguing.

Given a crisis, and the Vicar's view was interesting, because it was, as a rule, exactly the view which the average man would be likely to take, melodramatic, sentimental, commonplace, with this difference, that whereas the average man is tongue-tied and has no faculty of expression, the Vicar had an extraordinarily rich and emphatic vocabulary; and it was thus an artistic presentment of the ordinary standpoint. But in daily life the Vicar talked with impregnable continuity about any subject in which he happened to be interested.