[Footnote 1:  “Record of a Year’s Reading” (6_d_.  Mowbray) would be useful to you.]

Conversation.

Tourgenieff has a story in which three young princes, one by one, went into an enchanted garden and plucked a magic apple which gave the eater one wish.  The first asked for money, the second for beauty, the third for the good-will of old women.  The third proved to be the successful one.

If a fairy godmother offered you one gift, what would you choose?  I am not sure that you would not do well to imitate that shrewd young prince!  It is old ladies who can teach you knowledge of the world, and whose good-will gets you the most desirable invitations!  However, you can easily gain their good-will without any apple, so that, on the whole, I should advise a princess to choose the gift of being a good Talker—­or rather one who produces good Talk.

A woman Macaulay, even with brilliant flashes of silence, is not loved:  you do not want a hostess who “holds forth,” but one who sets her guests talking; and every woman is the hostess when she is talking to a man, or to any one younger or shyer than herself.  You should make people go away with a regretful feeling that they missed a great deal by having talked so much themselves that they heard very little from you.

Do you think it is easy to listen—­that it means mere silence?  I assure you it means nothing of the sort; it means listening with all your heart and soul and mind, and making the speaker feel, by your way of listening, that you have a heart and a soul and a mind.  There could not well be anything further from the person who makes him feel that there is a mere dead wall of silence before him at which he is talking.

Listening is a fine art and requires great tact and a peculiar delicate perception of the shades that are passing over the speaker’s mind, and dictating (often unconsciously) the words he says—­words which in themselves do not convey his mind, unless you are of the family of the Interpreter in Bunyan, and know by instinct what he feels.

Only a large heart of quick understanding has this gift; but we help our heart wonderfully by keeping our mind keen.  The heart is apt to be very blundering and stupid by itself; just as the mind is very apt to go off on a wrong scent about people, unless you have a warm heart to throw true light on their motives.

A quick-witted heart is what I should put as the first requisite for a good talker; and next a noble heart—­a heart that cares for the best side of things and people, a heart which brings out the bearable side of circumstances, and the nobler side of people, and the interesting side of subjects.

Some people are like Kay, in Anderson’s “Snow Queen,” they have a bit of ice in their heart, and they see all the smallnesses and absurdities about them, instead of being alive to the pathos, or endurance, or good-nature of the apparently stupid lives round them.  They are always in a critical, carping, superior frame of mind.  These people can often talk brilliantly, but it is thin.  You cannot have a large mind without a large heart.  ’We live by admiration, hope, and love;’ without these, we cease to live—­we wither.