This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory.  None other can account for its universality.  You can carry contagion of it in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental constitution, who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit.  There is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases about it—­such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly.  It is rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for fifty years and then die of something else.

I never heard of a yacht which did not carry at least one of this particular breed of bores upon every trip.  I never heard of a private-car party which was free from it.  Or, if you do not carry them with you, you meet them on the way, and they ruin the sunset for the whole party.

Something ought to be done about it.  There ought to be a poll-tax on bores.  Mothers ought to train their children to avoid lying and boring people with equal earnestness.  Infirmaries should be established for the purpose of making the stupid interesting, or classes organized on “How to be Brief,” or on “The Art of Relating Salient Points,” or on “The Best Method of Skipping the Unessentials in Conversation.” I would go, for one.

I quite envy a man who is an acknowledged bore.  He is so free from responsibility. He does not care that the conversation dies every time he shows his face.  He is used to it.  It is nothing to him that clever men and women ache audibly in his presence. He has no reputation to lose.  The hostess is not a friend of his, for whom he feels that he must exert himself.  A bore has no friends.  He is a social leech.

It implies, first of all, a superb conceit to think anybody wishes one to tell all about anything, but conceit is a natural attribute—­a twin brother of its sister, vanity—­and everybody has it to a greater or less degree.  Indeed, the cleverest man I know—­quite the cleverest—­is one who always panders to this particular foible because he recognizes its universality.  He has a country-house, which is always full of guests, with a great many girls among them.  Every afternoon, when he drives out from town, his first sentence is, “Now come, children, and tell me all about everything.  Who has been here, and what they said, and what you thought, and everything that has happened, including all that is going to happen.  Don’t skip a word.”

See the base flattery of that!  Is it any wonder that his house is always full?  What bores he would be responsible for making if we were stupid enough to do as he asks!  The chief reason people do not is that ten people cannot tell all they know about everything, even if they want to.  He is only furnished with two ears.

The dyspeptic is one who makes the most valiant effort to try.  His dyspepsia is the most important issue of the world with him, and he will talk about it.  He cannot keep still and let other people enjoy their sound digestion and healthful sleep.  He will not even let other people eat in peace.  When he refuses a dish at table he must needs tell you why—­just as if you cared!