This devotion to “things” may easily become a ghoulish passion.  It is such that Ibsen hints at in the Master Builder, when he makes Aline Solness attribute her perpetual black, her somber eyes and smileless lips, not to the death of her two little boys which has come about through the burning of her home, that was a “dispensation of Providence” to which she “bows in submission,” but to the destruction of the things which were “mine”—­“All the old portraits were burnt upon the walls, and all the old silk dresses were burnt that had belonged to the family for generations and generations.  And all mother’s and grandmother’s lace—­that was burnt, too, and only think, the jewels too.”

One of the most disastrous effects of this preocccupation with the things and the labors of the household is the killing of conversation.  There is perhaps no more general weakness in the average American family than glumness!  The silent newspaper-reading father, the worried watchful mother, the surly boy, the fretful girl, these are characters typical in both town and country.  In one of Mrs. Daskam Bacon’s lively tales, “Ardelia in Arcadia,” the little heroine is transplanted from a lively, chattering, sweltering New York street to the maddening silence of an overworked farmer’s table.  She stands it as long as she can, then cries out, “For Gawd’s sake, talk!”

One secret of the attraction for the young of the city over the country or small town is contact with those who talk.  They are conscious of the exercise of a freedom they have never known—­the freedom to say what rises to the lips.  They experience the unknown joy of play of mind.  According to their observation the tongue and mind are used only when needed for serious service:  to keep them active, to allow them to perform whatever nimble feats their owners fancy—­this is a revelation!

Free family talk is sometimes ruined by a mistaken effort to direct it according to some artificial notions of what conversation means.  Conversation means free giving of what is uppermost in the mind.  The more spontaneous it is the more interesting and genuine it is.  It is this freedom which gives to the talk of the child its surprises and often its startling power to set one thinking.  Holding talk to some severe standard of consistency, dignity, or subject is sure to stiffen and hamper it.  There could have been nothing very free or joyful about talking according to a program as the ladies of the eighteenth-century salons were more or less inclined.  Good conversation runs like water; nothing is foreign to it.  “Farming is such an unintellectual subject,” I heard a critical young woman say to her husband, whose tastes were bucolic.  The young woman did not realize that one of the masterpieces of the greatest of the world’s writers was on farming—­most practical farming, too!  That which relates to the life of each, interests each, concerns each—­that is the material for conversation, if it is to be enjoyable or productive.