One who means to talk with entire sincerity,—­I said,—­always feels himself in danger of two things, namely,—­an affectation of bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in “Lear,” and actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger, is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short, and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is, who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.  Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,—­never a wave, and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.

You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well, you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.  Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,—­and, what is more, that we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just as it does that of music into notes.—­Well, they govern the world for all that, these sweet-lipped women,—­because beauty is the index of a larger fact than wisdom.

—­The Bombazine wanted an explanation.

Madam,—­said I,—­wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

—­All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I, suppose, seated—­we will say at a dinner-table—­alongside of an intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other’s faces,—­we exchange a dozen words.  One thing is settled:  we mean not to offend each other,—­to be perfectly courteous,—­more than courteous; for we are the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for it.

I don’t think people that talk over their victuals are like to say anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with strong drink before they begin jabberin’.