"
People whom you cannot get to attend to you when you talk to them are
disagreeable. There are men whom you feel it is vain to speak
to,--whether you are mentioning facts or stating arguments. All the
while you are speaking, they are thinking of what they are themselves
to say next. There is a strong current, as it were, setting outward
from their minds; and it prevents what you say from getting in. You
know, if a pipe be full of water, running strongly one way, it is vain
to think to push in a stream running the other way. You cannot get at
their attention. You cannot get at the quick of their mental
sensorium. It is not the dull of hearing whom it is hardest to get to
hear; it is rather the man who is roaring out himself, and so who
cannot attend to anything else. Now this is provoking. It is a
mortifying indication of the little importance that is attached to
what we are saying; and there is something of the irritation that is
produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance
of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward
signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye
that is looking beyond you,--the grin that is not at anything funny in
what you say,--the occasional inarticulate sounds that are put in at
the close of your sentences, as if to delude you with a show of
attention.
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