Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1883 — Knowing Too Many People. [ARTICLE]

Knowing Too Many People.

The older we grow the more fastidious, as a rule, we become socially. We like the friends we can count upon—who are “as easy as an old shoe” with us; but we shrink, from the new ones, especially, I need not say, from any that give the least suggestion of patentleather. ' There are those to whom the companionship of persons of title makes amends for everything; but I am speaking of a class who have overlived such illusions and made up their minds, during the span left them in this world, to be comfortable. Old friends, or, if new ones, nice ones; intelligent society with a humorous bent in it; the most perfect freedom of thought and speech; these alone to mature persons make social life worth living; all the rest is strained, pretentious and uncomfortable. As a very young man, I once sought an introduction to a well-known woman of letters in London. She is not now of much importance, being dead and forgotten; but all literary persons had then an attraction for me (as indeed they have now), and I expressed a wish through a common friend to know her. “My dear fellow,” he wrote, after making his application, “she will have nothing to do with you. She says, she knows a great deal too many people already.” At the time I thought this rather rude, but I have long learned to envy that lady’s moral courage. How delightful it would be, if one dared, to hove that noble truth printed on one’s card, and when new folks call upon ns whom one does not know to return them this by post: “Mi-. So and So’s compliments, but he knows a great deal too many people already I”—-Longman’s Magazine.