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Show The Power of Silence. The defensive power of silence is perhaps per-haps the one we observe least carefully, because it is the subtlest. In the friction and passion and function of daily life, what a weapon is a mute! You find fault with the coffee, the weather,-the furnace, the baby. Your little jet of ill-nature splutters up into the . surcharged sur-charged air of a tired household,, like a match on the edge of a gasoline tank. You expect and deserve an explosion. Suppose none follows ? The spark flares, goes out without a sizzle, followed by a blankness which gives you the sense of having made an intellectual fiasco. You are met by sweet or stinging silence, as the case may be. Her eyes give you one blessed or bitter look ; but her lips betray her not. Nobody No-body "answers back." You are left beating the 'air with an idle blade. You are humiliated, like a man whose challenge is unaccepted through scorn. Your mortification is her victory divinely " noble or humanly mean, as chances the spirit behind it. She is silent through gentleness or through spite. Either beats. In the one case you are ashamed of yourself ; in the other you would not much mind being ashamed of her but in either she has struck you with a thrust which you Can not parry. You go down before the .invisible .in-visible third in the visible, duel; the strong spiritual force which consists in not saying it. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. |