common talk of people!  We infer sometimes that the hens are not saying anything, because they do not read, and consequently their minds are empty.  And perhaps we are right.  As to conversation, there is no use in sending the bucket into the well when the well is dry—­it only makes a rattling of windlass and chain.  We do not wish to be understood to be an enemy of the light traffic of human speech.  Deliver us from the didactic and the everlastingly improving style of thing!  Conversation, in order to be good, and intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not always be serious.  It must be alert and intelligent, and mean more by its suggestions and allusions than is said.  There is the light touch-and-go play about topics more or less profound that is as agreeable as heat-lightning in a sultry evening.  Why may not a person express the whims and vagaries of a lambent mind (if he can get a lambent mind) without being hauled up short for it, and plunged into a heated dispute?  In the freedom of real conversation the mind throws out half-thoughts, paradoxes, for which a man is not to be held strictly responsible to the very roots of his being, and which need to be caught up and played with in the same tentative spirit.  The dispute and the hot argument are usually the bane of conversation and the death of originality.  We like to express a notion, a fancy, without being called upon to defend it, then and there, in all its possible consequences, as if it were to be an article in a creed or a plank in a platform.  Must we be always either vapid or serious?

We have been obliged to take notice of the extraordinary tendency of American women to cultivation, to the improvement of the mind, by means of reading, clubs, and other intellectual exercises, and to acknowledge that they are leaving the men behind; that is, the men not in the so-called professions.  Is this intellectualization beginning to show in the conversation of women when they are together, say in the hours of relaxation in the penetralia spoken of, or in general society?  Is there less talk about the fashion of dress, and the dearness or cheapness of materials, and about servants, and the ways of the inchoate citizen called the baby, and the infinitely little details of the private life of other people?  Is it true that if a group of men are talking, say about politics, or robust business, or literature, and they are joined by women (whose company is always welcome), the conversation is pretty sure to take a lower mental plane, to become more personal, more frivolous, accommodating itself to quite a different range?  Do the well-read, thoughtful women, however beautiful and brilliant and capable of the gayest persiflage, prefer to talk with men, to listen to the conversation of men, rather than to converse with or listen to their own sex?  If this is true, why is it?  Women, as a rule, in “society” at any rate, have more leisure than men.  In the facilities and felicities of