But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it.
I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and swearing softly, I regret to say) when it affected me like a Hymn Tune.
I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M---- in North Carolina. The first thing he said was, when we were seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that afternoon, and he had faithfully promised to be there. But a weekend in North Carolina appealed to him, and afternoon tea--well, he explained to me, crossing his legs and beaming at me all over as if he were a whole genial, successful afternoon tea all by himself--afternoon tea did not appeal to him.
He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person.
As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every minute all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we heard from him), we called him the Non-Gregarious Person, and every time he piled on one more story, we reminded him how non-gregarious he was. We called him Non-Gregarious all the way after that--Non for short.
This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has been Non ever since.
I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who let themselves go, a very serious person. When he talked about his business, he was even religious. Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of business--his own business--that almost startled me at first. He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself.
For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house. No better arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in more kinds of people at once and for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house. No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this world, until he has built a house. I submit this proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to try it. There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them. Everything you come upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any man who is sensitive to houses and to people and who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of it, and never enter that house again.