And the other exclaims with equal delight—­

“I don’t know him very well either, but I used to hear the Willie Johnsons talk about him all the time.”

They are saved.

Half an hour after they are still standing there talking of Beverly Dixon.

The Etiquette Book

Personally I have suffered so much from inability to begin a conversation that not long ago I took the extreme step of buying a book on the subject.  I regret to say that I got but little light or help from it.  It was written by the Comtesse de Z—.  According to the preface the Comtesse had “moved in the highest circles of all the European capitals.”  If so, let her go on moving there.  I for one, after trying her book, shall never stop her.  This is how the Comtesse solves the problem of opening a conversation: 

“In commencing a conversation, the greatest care should be devoted to the selection of a topic, good taste demanding that one should sedulously avoid any subject of which one’s vis-a-vis may be in ignorance.  Nor are the mere words alone to be considered.  In the art of conversation much depends upon manner.  The true conversationalist must, in opening, invest himself with an atmosphere of interest and solicitude.  He must, as we say in French, be prepared to payer les rais de la conversation.  In short, he must ‘give himself an air.’”

There!  Go and do it if you can.  I admit that I can’t.  I have no idea what the French phrase above means, but I know that personally I cannot “invest myself with an atmosphere of interest.”  I might manage about two per cent on five hundred dollars.  But what is that in these days of plutocracy?

At any rate I tried the Comtesse’s directions at a reception last week, on being introduced to an unknown lady.  And they failed.  I cut out nearly all the last part, and confined myself merely to the proposed selection of a topic, endeavouring to pick it with as much care as if I were selecting a golf club out of a bag.  Naturally I had to confine myself to the few topics that I know about, and on which I can be quite interesting if I get started.

“Do you know any mathematics?” I asked.

“No,” said the lady.

This was too bad.  I could have shown her some good puzzles about the squares of the prime numbers up to forty-one.

I paused and gave myself more air.

“How are you,” I asked, “on hydrostatics?”

“I beg your pardon,” she said.  Evidently she was ignorant again.

“Have you ever studied the principles of aerial navigation?” I asked.

“No,” She answered.

I was pausing again and trying to invest myself with an air of further interest, when another man was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that I have.

“Oh, how do you do?” he said.  “I say, I’ve just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon.  Great, isn’t it?”