over, the young wife entered at last. Always on the lookout for the
sincerities of human nature (sincerity counting for life-giving form,
whatever the matter might be) as he delighted in watching children,
Montaigne loved also to watch grown people when they were most like
children; at their games, therefore, and in the mechanical and
customary parts of their existence, as discovering the real soul in
them. Abstaining from the dice himself, since for him such "play was
not play enough, but too grave and serious a diversion," and
remarking that "the play of children is not performed in play, but to
be judged as their most serious action," he set Gaston and the
amiable, unpedantic, lady to play together, where he might observe
them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation,
the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's
recreations.--Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into
swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly,
that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the
conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books,
meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking
intervals of a long day-sleep.



V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

[91] The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!--so deep a sense
of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever
changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable
differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware,
on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. That
the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest