But we also do wrong to hold gossip in too much discredit. It gives
life fascination, makes the most stupid neighbors interesting. It
keeps up the love of the great art of fiction and the industry of
character-analysis. A small wonder that human beings are addicted
to it, when we are so emphatically assured that heaven itself is
devoted to it, and that we are under the incessant espionage of our
Deity, while the angels are eavesdroppers and reporters carrying
note-books in which they write with indelible ink the least things
we do or say or think.
CHAPTER XV
To see into other people's hearts and homes and lives is one of
the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all the sciences are
rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that makes us hanker to
get back of faces into brains, to push through words into thoughts,
and to ferret out of silences the emotions they smother.
Gossip is one of the great vibrations of the universe. Like rain,
it falls on the just and on the unjust; it ruins and it revives;
it quenches thirst; it makes the desert bloom with cactuses and
grotesque flowers, and it beats down violets and drowns little birds
in their nests.
Gossip was now awakening a new and fearful interest in Charity Coe
and Jim Dyckman.
Two women sitting at a hair-dresser's were discussing the gossip
according to Prissy through the shower of their tresses. The manicure
working on the nails of one of them glanced up at the coiffeur and
gasped with her eyes.
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