"How is that handsome, brilliant boy of yours?" a devoted mother asked me the other day. "How I wish my Jack were like him! But he's only just a dear, good, ordinary boy who'll never set the Thames on fire; well, we can't all be the mother of a genius!" Now, could one do anything else than invite that truly discriminating woman to lunch?
As I said before, it is some people's mission to draw others out. Some take everything hard, among other things, society. They hate to be among their kind, but they hate just as much the dignity of solitude; so they compromise matters by going about as dull and dreary as graven images, surrounded by a private atmosphere of frost. Then there are the adaptable ones who talk and laugh, while down in their souls they are bored to death. But never mind about being bored, the crime is to look bored. Adaptability is distinctly not an English national trait, rather is it American, the race made up of all races, and for this reason American society is, even if only on the surface,—and who in society ever gets below the surface?—more amusing than English society.
Oh, the heavenly rest and comfort when you pause exhausted after having pumped at a perfectly empty human being to find the process applied to yourself, and after all you do respond.
I was struck by it the other day when, in a roomful of English people who had been talked to and trotted out and made to show their best paces each in his own little field, there came to the charming, but exhausted, hostess a Frenchman who proceeded to draw her out. The sweet restfulness of it! She had not to originate a single idea, and I am perfectly sure that every other man in the room was holding forth on some subject originated by the woman he was talking to; he was likely to talk till he had run down, and then she would have to wind him up with a new subject. If she didn't he would go away and leave her mortified and alone, and a woman can stand being bored, but she cannot stand looking deserted. A lovely woman told me all about it once.
"The reason I am so popular," she said frankly, "is because I flatter the men to the top of their bent. Vanity and love make the world go round,—vanity first and love a long way after. Nothing else.
"Tell a woman she is perfect and she doubts you—sometimes. But tell a man that (one can in all sorts of ways), why, he only thinks it is his due—possibly he will think you are clever. Most men are stupid—I don't mean their working brains, their bread-and-butter brains, but their society brains. They swallow anything you tell them. They originate everything in this blessed world—but conversation.
"If a man converses he discourses and he improves your mind. Now you don't always want to have your mind improved! I don't say he doesn't know how to make love; but that doesn't count, for after all, making love is, often as not, silence à deux. So if he isn't improving your mind or making love he is stranded, and that is where we women come in.
"I don't want my mind improved at an afternoon tea, nor do I wish to be made love to over an uninspiring biscuit, and I should feel eternally disgraced if either of us looked bored; so I give him leading questions like sugar-plums, and while he nibbles away at each in turn till he has sucked it up, I have learnt to look at him with all my eyes—a kind of subdued rapture which I adjust according to the man, and then I detach my mind and consider what the clever stupid can talk about next.
"It isn't necessary to do anything but to smile, especially if you have nice teeth, as he does all the talking; but he'll think you are the cleverest woman going. Possibly you are, only he doesn't really know how clever you are! There are some women you have to treat in the same way, and they are either very distinguished and spoilt or they are very influential, or they have missions; but it's always a bore, and unless you are 'on the make'—a very ill-bred expression, I think—it's tiresome and doesn't pay. I don't mind being bored for the sake of a man, but I really won't be bored for the sake of a woman.
"But, my dear, it is very fatiguing at best, and no wonder the women crowd into retreats and nervine asylums. It isn't the pace that kills, but the unearthly dulness. After I have talked to half a dozen men for whom I make conversation I go home to bed, and the vitality I have left wouldn't be enough for an able-bodied worm.