The only two kinds of talker that I find tiresome are the talker of paradoxes and the egotist.  A few paradoxes are all very well; they are stimulating and gently provocative.  But one gets tired of a string of them; they become little more than a sort of fence erected round a man’s mind; one despairs of ever knowing what a paradoxical talker really thinks.  Half the charm of good talk consists in the glimpses and peeps one gets into the stuff of a man’s thoughts; and it is wearisome to feel that a talker is for ever tossing subjects on his horns, perpetually trying to say the unexpected, the startling thing.  In the best talk of all, a glade suddenly opens up, like the glades in the Alpine forests through which they bring the timber down to the valley; one sees a long green vista, all bathed in shimmering sunshine, with the dark head of a mountain at the top.  So in the best talk one has a sudden sight of something high, sweet, serious, austere.

The other kind of talk that I find very disagreeable is the talk of a full-fledged egotist, who converses without reference to his hearers, and brings out what is in his mind.  One gets interesting things in this way from time to time; but the essence, as I have said, of good talk is that one should have provoking and stimulating peeps into other minds, not that one should be compelled to gaze and stare into them.  I have a friend, or rather an acquaintance, whose talk is just as if he opened a trap-door into his mind:  you look into a dark place where something flows, stream or sewer; sometimes it runs clear and brisk, but at other times it seems to be charged with dirt and debris; and yet there is no escape; you have to stand and look, to breathe the very odours of the mind, until he chooses to close the door.

The mistake that many earnest and persevering talkers make is to suppose that to be engrossed is the same thing as being engrossing.  It is true of conversation as of many other things, that the half is better than the whole.  People who are fond of talking ought to beware of being lengthy.  How one knows the despair of conversing with a man who is determined to make a clear and complete statement of everything, and not to let his hearer off anything!  Arguments, questions, views, rise in the mind in the course of the harangue, and are swept away by the moving stream.  Such talkers suffer from a complacent feeling that their information is correct and complete, and that their deductions are necessarily sound.  But it is quite possible to form and hold a strong opinion, and yet to realize that it is after all only one point of view, and that there is probably much to be said on the other side.  The unhappiest feature of drifting into a habit of positive and continuous talk is that one has few friends faithful enough to criticise such a habit and tell one the unvarnished truth; if the habit is once confirmed, it becomes almost impossible to break it off.  I know of a family conclave