The Art of Worldly Wisdom(48)

So much depends on being a person of depth. The interior must be at least as much as the exterior. There are natures all frontage, like houses that for want of means have the portico of a palace leading to the rooms of a cottage. It is no use boring into such persons—although they bore you—for conversation flags after the first salutation. They prance through the first compliments like Sicilian stallions, but silence soon follows, for the flow of words soon ceases where there is no spring of thoughts. Others may be taken in by them because they themselves have but a view of the surface, but not the prudent, who look within them and find nothing there except material for scorn.