vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air, would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be surprised?  It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a whole world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will have no formula of experience.  To take the journey is perhaps too heroic treatment for the disease of conformity—­the sort of malaria of our exclusive civilization.

The Drawer is not urging this journey, nor any break-up of the social order, for it knows how painful a return to individuality may be.  It is easier to go on in the subordination of one’s personality to the strictly conventional life.  It expects rather to record a continually perfected machinery, a life in which not only speech but ideas are brought into rule.  We have had something to say occasionally of the art of conversation, which is in danger of being lost in the confused babel of the reception and the chatter of the dinner-party—­the art of listening and the art of talking both being lost.  Society is taking alarm at this, and the women as usual are leaders in a reform.  Already, by reason of clubs-literary, scientific, economic—­woman is the well-informed part of our society.  In the “Conversation Lunch” this information is now brought into use.  The lunch, and perhaps the dinner, will no longer be the occasion of satisfying the appetite or of gossip, but of improving talk.  The giver of the lunch will furnish the topic of conversation.  Two persons may not speak at once; two persons may not talk with each other; all talk is to be general and on the topic assigned, and while one is speaking, the others must listen.  Perhaps each lady on taking her seat may find in her napkin a written slip of paper which shall be the guide to her remarks.  Thus no time is to be wasted on frivolous topics.  The ordinary natural flow of rejoinder and repartee, the swirling of talk around one obstacle and another, its winding and rippling here and there as individual whim suggests, will not be allowed, but all will be improving, and tend to that general culture of which we have been speaking.  The ladies’ lunch is not to be exactly a debating society, but an open occasion for the delivery of matured thought and the acquisition of information.

The object is not to talk each other down, but to improve the mind, which, unguided, is apt to get frivolous at the convivial board.  It is notorious that men by themselves at lunch or dinner usually shun grave topics and indulge in persiflage, and even descend to talk about wine and the made dishes.  The women’s lunch of this summer takes higher ground.  It will give Mr. Browning his final estimate; it will settle Mr. Ibsen; it will determine the suffrage question; it will adjudicate between the total abstainers and the halfway covenant of high license; it will not hesitate to cut down the tariff.