I think there are good qualities to be found in guests,
and some bad ones in even the best hosts.
Our deepest instincts, bad or good, are those which we share with the
rest of the animal creation. To offer hospitality, or to accept it, is
but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his self-
development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do birds
keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been so
seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to accept
man's hospitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he run
out and invite another dog to share it with him?--and does your cat
insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk?
Quite the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all
these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have acquired some
willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may;
cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though
certain monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than
any wolves or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we
began to be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that
now and again--say, towards the end of the Stone Age--one or another
among the more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked
an eagle that he had snared the day before, `That red-haired man who
lives in the next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of
person.
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