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Updated: May 27, 2025
A man is not a character, he is a dozen characters, one of them prominent, the other eleven more or less undeveloped. I knew a man once, two of whose characters were of equal value, and the consequences were peculiar." We begged him to relate the case to us, and he did so. "He was a Balliol man," said MacShaughnassy, "and his Christian name was Joseph.
"It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly; "but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people. Do you know," he continued, "when I hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous. Once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past.
My wife's present estimate of MacShaughnassy's knowledge is the result of reaction. The first time she ever saw him, she and he got on wonderfully well together; and when I returned to the drawing-room, after seeing him down to the gate, her first words were, "What a wonderful man that Mr. MacShaughnassy is. He seems to know so much about everything." That describes MacShaughnassy exactly.
"That's the sort of story we want," said the MacShaughnassy, raising himself into a sitting position. "You listen to this, Brown." Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with his elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence. "There are three people in this story," he began; "the wife, the wife's husband, and the other man.
Let Brown write to his sister at Newnham, and find out whom the intellectual maiden favours, while Jephson can learn from Miss Medbury what is most attractive to the common-sensed girl." This plan we had adopted, and the result was now under consideration. MacShaughnassy opened the proceedings by reading his aunt's letter.
MacShaughnassy having had his innings, Jephson took a turn, and told us a pathetic story about an unfortunate mongrel that was run over in the Strand one day and its leg broken. A medical student, who was passing at the time, picked it up and carried it to the Charing Cross Hospital, where its leg was set, and where it was kept and tended until it was quite itself again, when it was sent home.
But," he would add, "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll write to my aunt and ask her." And a day or two afterwards he would call again, bringing his aunt's advice with him; and, if you were young and inexperienced, or a natural born fool, you might possibly follow it. She sent us a recipe on one occasion, through MacShaughnassy, for the extermination of blackbeetles.
"You mean," added Jephson, "that you cannot understand why a spirit, not compelled as we are by the exigencies of society, should care to spend its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation with a room full of abnormally uninteresting people." "That is precisely what I cannot understand," MacShaughnassy agreed. "Nor I, either," said Jephson.
Ethelbertha replied that of course I knew what she meant. What could a couple of raw bachelors know about life and human nature? As regarded MacShaughnassy in particular, she was of opinion that if we only wanted out of him all that he knew, and could keep him to the subject, we ought to be able to get that into about a page.
I tried a little while ago to cure MacShaughnassy of his fatal passion for advice-giving, by repeating to him a very sad story that was told to me by a gentleman I met in an American railway car.
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