Originally, I suppose, this adjective ‘gentle’ was used in a sense quite different from that which it later acquired. Now I gaze around me in increasing bewilderment as I ask, Is it possible that I am the only living American who still likes quiet stories? In my own person do I represent the entire surviving public for amiable, leisurely novels about amiable, leisurely people, doing amiable, leisurely things? Am I, in short, the last incarnation of that once courted and ubiquitous individual, ‘the gentle reader’? II For many years I fondly believed that my taste in reading matter, while not necessarily universal, was at least shared by a considerable body of agreeable men and women. This is very much the state of mind in which I find myself to-day as I turn the pages of our magazines, saunter through the bookshops, or glance at the lists of new publications. Finally some feeble old man is haled from the rear of the shop to admit that he knows what you have in mind, but to add, without interest, ‘We no longer have any call for that style.’ A canvass of other shops produces the same result, until slowly you are faced by two sombre conclusions: either you have always been more or less of a crank where hats were concerned, or else the swift passage of time has left you behind - an outmoded buck, a pathetic survival. But when you go to a hatter’s to renew your stock the clerks all stare at you in dull incomprehension. If the question were raised, you would take your oath that, within a week, you had seen a dozen well-dressed men wearing precisely that sort of headgear. ![]() For example, you have grown accustomed to a certain kind of hat which you consider both rakish and practical. IT is one of the most upsetting moments of life when one discovers that some taste, habit, or standard of judgment which one has trusted for years and supposed to be universal is not really universal at all, but is merely a personal eccentricity.
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