In two minutes they were talking like old friends.  How do these silly asses do it?

When Dressed Hogs are Dull

An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.

The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name Money Hog.  This kind of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to my mind the head-line of the market reports in the newspapers, “Dressed Hogs are Dull.”

The other party to the conversation is a winsome and agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.

But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z——­ would say, I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two of them from a recollection of my childhood.  I remember that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there was a picture entitled “The Lady in Love With A Swine.”  A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility.  With the picture was the rhyming legend,

   There was a Lady in love with a swine,
   “Honey,” said she, “will you be mine? 
   I’ll build you a silver sty
   And in it you shall lie.” 
   “Honk!” said He.

There was something, as I recall it, in the sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly appealing, and contrasted with the dull mannerless passivity of the swine.

In each of the little stanzas that followed, the pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a surly and monosyllabic “honk” from the hog.

Here is the social counterpart of the scene in the picture-book.  Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is standing in his tessellated sty,—­the tessellated sty being represented by the hardwood floor of a fashionable drawing-room.  His face is just the same as the face of the pig in the picture-book.  The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, is beside him.

“Oh, Mr. Grunt,” she is saying, “how interesting it must be to be in your place and feel such tremendous power.  Our hostess was just telling me that you own practically all the shoemaking machinery factories—­it is shoe-making machinery, isn’t it?—­east of Pennsylvania.”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“Shoe-making machinery,” goes on the willowy lady (she really knows nothing and cares less about it) “must be absolutely fascinating, is it not?”

“Honk!” says Mr. Grunt.

“But still you must find it sometimes a dreadful strain, do you not?  I mean, so much brain work, and that sort of thing.”