Sometimes she has a way of talking to you at an oblique angle. She likes to banter while she pours tea, for example, parrying and thrusting with the agility of one of those Viennese girls who know how to fence with a blade in each hand. When Mme. De Staël declared that conversation, “like talent, exists only in France,” Miss America had not grown up. It still is true, probably, as Mrs. Poyser pointed out, that a woman “can count a stocking top while a man’s gitting his tongue ready.” Man’s development has been distressingly slow. He never has met but indifferently the supreme test of the tête-à-tête. It may be that his habits of life dispose him to take an exaggerated, sometimes even a morbid, view of the hazard of words. Regarding the situation solemnly is fatal to facility. The situation is not, and cannot be, intrinsically solemn, being devised to get away from solemnity. The talk is no more momentous than the tea. Neither is an end, but only a means. “It grieves my heart,” cried Addison, “to see a couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.” Now this comment, surely, represents a most unwholesome frame of mind, subversive of that relaxation which Delsarte and many charming women disciples have bidden us cultivate.
Alas! it would be a good thing if sipping tea for a whole afternoon in one room were the worst sin practised by our young women. Sipping tea in a dozen rooms on the same afternoon is surely a worse matter. In the days when people gave up a whole afternoon to a call, conversational stitching and tea drinking were reduced to a science, and gossip to a fine art. In a later day, when the author of the Synthetic Philosophy found occasion to marvel over and to lament the velocity with which men and women were going about their affairs in this country, calling customs had utterly changed. If our women had undertaken to perpetuate throughout the year the New Year’s Day habits of the sociable Dutch of Manhattan, they could not have been more successful. The potency of pasteboard and the human imagination have not greatly diminished the pressure, and will not so long as the intoxication of mere rapidity continues to preserve its power. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has colloquially expressed the distressing celerity with which certain classes of fashionable women rush in, laugh, talk, eat and disappear, in the tersely alliterative “giggle, gabble, gobble, git.”
These habits are, of course, utterly destructive of good talk. Modern society talk under the pressure of numbers and a consent to oscillate violently, is like the scattered fragments of a word game. A man—I cannot speak for a woman—emerges from a “crush” with fresh emotions toward the grotesquely ironical definition of words as the vehicle of thought.
Gossip
However, I am glad to think that Miss America does not seek to revive the spectacular talking such as women did in the days of the old French salons. A woman talking to a dozen men at the same time may have been a charming affair. Mme. Récamier is credited with having done it very well. But no sane and truthful man ever will admit his contentment with the microscopic fragment of a woman’s attention. Exclusive interest in a woman is undoubtedly a primitive instinct, yet the great deference paid to success in the tête-à-tête well may justify this instinctive preference, and those hostesses surely will be most successful who devise some liberty for this instinct. The tendency of our social life is doubtless against centralization. There can be no more monologists, it seems. “The worst of hearing Carlyle,” said Margaret Fuller, “is that you cannot interrupt him.” The modern social gathering, whatever its aims or variations, is quite sure at least of this quality,—that it will interrupt. We cannot deny that even “One-Minute Conversations with Nice Girls” is an experience having its compensations as well as its drawbacks, for while a few eloquent seconds with many women may not be so desirable in some ways as many eloquent seconds with one woman, it always must be difficult to know beforehand just when this will be the case. Mr. Warner has shrewdly pointed out that some women are interesting for five minutes, some for ten, some for an hour; “some,” he adds, “are not exhausted in a whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence) are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine stupidity.” The trouble is (as you might guess) that the interruption always cuts you off at the end of three minutes with the girl who would be interesting for a whole day. For aught I know, society may have averaged this thing, and have discovered that the low limit is safest, that it leaves both parties most completely in possession of the benefit of the doubt. But how few men can start a new conversation every ninety seconds with anything like the success that attends a woman’s efforts to do the same thing?
No, woman, who created Society with its capital letter, has succeeded, whether by design or accident, in producing a situation in which she is placed at a very definite advantage. She can riddle a man with deadly small shot before he can roll up his heavy guns. Yet she never will like the man who either refuses the close order or surrenders. She will like him best if he “puts up a good fight.” If he stammers, she knows just how to deal with his broken English and keep him going. Quot linguae, tot homines. But you cannot multiply a woman that way. One language is all that she needs. Small talk is a large question. As the loose change of vocal currency, it is an indispensable commodity. The larger denominations are not available. As for cashing an intellectual check, good as your credit may be, it is out of the question altogether; and a wise man recognizes the fact that in the matter of this commodity woman is a banker who must always pocket a margin.
One day in a far Southwestern city the belle of the place drove me in a dogcart for a memorable half hour. She was no taller than I, but she wore a magnificent hat, one of those hats which even the girl could not make you forget, and as she sat on the “dinky,” she arose beside me in a quelling contrast. The horse was a smart stepper (at least that is my confused impression), the road demanded a discriminating rein; but though we drove past the leading hotel in the crisis of the event, and drew the fire of a hundred eyes, that girl’s delightful wit never faltered nor forsook her, that is to say, never forsook me; for, of course, I needed a helping hand. No man not specifically trained to it could gracefully maintain himself at such an altitude with any credit to his power of speech. When I recall that dashing day, the roll of the cart, the flutter of those lofty feathers, the firm grace of those little gloved hands, the healthy glow of the face I looked up to, I feel an accentuated humility, a deep conviction of my oral inferiority.