ting in a group for perhaps
the only time during the day. It helps immeasurably to cooerdinate
effort, but it sometimes fails to make the lunch hour the restful break
in the middle of the day which it should be. It is generally much more
fun and of much more benefit to swap fish stories and hunting yarns than
to go over the details of the work in the publicity department or to
formulate the plans for handling the Smith and Smith proposition.
Momentous questions should be thrust aside until later, and the talk
should be--well, _talk_, not arguing, quarreling, or scandal-mongering.
The subject does not greatly matter except that it should be something
in which all of the people at the table are interested. Whistler was
once asked what he would do if he were out at dinner and the
conversation turned to the Mexican War, and some one asked him the date
of a certain battle. "Do?" he replied. "Why, I would refuse to associate
with people who could talk of such things at dinner!"

Polite society has always placed a high value on table manners, but it
is only recently that they have come to play so large a part in
business. Some one has said that you cannot mix business and friendship.
It would be nearer the truth to say that you cannot separate them. More
and more it is becoming the habit to transact affairs over the table,
and a very pleasant thing it is, too. Aside from the coziness and warmth
which comes from breaking bread together one is free from the
interruptions and noise of the office, and many a commercial
acquaintance has ripened into a friend and many a business connection
has been cemented into something stronger through the genial influence
of something good to eat and drink. It is, of course, a mistake to
depend too much upon one's social gifts. They are very pleasant and
helpful but the work of the world is done in offices, not on golf links
or in dining rooms. We have little patience with the man who sets his
nose to the grindstone and does not take it away until death comes in
between, but we have just as little with the man who has never touched
the grindstone.

Stories go the rounds of executives who choose their subordinates by
asking them out to lunch and watching the way they eat. One man always
calls for celery and judges his applicant by what he does with it. If he
eats only the tender parts the executive decides that he is extravagant,
at least with other people's money, but if he eats the whole stalk