“I forget. But no matter. One may talk about, and about things, at breakfast especially. It is pleasant to feel that you may kick—that any one concerned may kick—the foot-ball of talk without reference to a goal.”
“I don’t think my friend Carington would agree to that,” said Ellett. “He likes talk to be well feathered, and go straight home—”
“And I like it,” cried Anne, “to be well feathered, and go zigzag home, or not, like a bird.”
“And, for my part, aside from Ellett’s calumnious nonsense,” laughed Carington, “I have no social creed as to good talk. If it bears sharp analysis, it is probably poor talk.”
“But,” said Anne, “there are some essentials. One must reverse the great maxim that it is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Mrs. Lyndsay regarded the maiden lady with a look of reprobation, in which were trial, judgment, and execution. She reserved her verbal attack for a better occasion, while Anne, unconscious of offense, went on, “Wasn’t it Mr. Lowell, Archie, who said at our table, when you questioned him as to the best talkers he had met, ‘Oh, the best are those who meet you’? I thought that delicately put.”
“But then he added,” said Lyndsay, “when you mentioned G. M. as on the whole the most remarkable of dinner talkers, that he had not the essential conversational art of punctuation. That his sentences were like those of Judge Jeffries, eternal How one spoils such a thing in the telling! We all smiled at it a little. Our friend himself liked an audience, and to have, at times, the royal freedom of unbroken talk. North, a friend of ours, Mr. Carington, has a theory that breakfast talks are the best.”
“I should think so,” said Ellett, and then began to think he had been rather critical, and added, “I mean—well, I usually breakfast alone, and a fellow can’t talk to himself.”
“This fellow can,” cried Anne.
“He meant,” said Lyndsay, “that breakfast talk is apt to be general and gay; but that at dinner you have the cares of the day on your back. It takes a little effort, or a little champagne, to get up steam.”