.

"He was at Mrs. X's," said some one.

"How do you know that?"

"Indeed! Don't I know her way? She'd make a raven go home rivaling the
nightingale."

To be able to make your guests better pleased with themselves is the
greatest of all social accomplishments.

"An ideal dinner party," says a famous London hostess, "resembles
nothing so much as a masterpiece of the jeweler's art in the center of
which is some crystalline gem in the form of a sparkling and sympathetic
hostess round whom the guests are arranged in an effective setting." It
would seem quite as necessary that a host prove a crystalline gem in
this masterpiece of the jeweler's art. To be signally successful at
dinner-giving, care to make the talk interesting is as necessary as care
in the preparation of viands. Really successful hosts and hostesses take
as much precaution against fatalities in conversation as against those
which offend the palate. While attending carefully to the polishing of
the crystal and to the preparing of the menu which will make their table
a delight, they remember that the intellect of their guests must be
satisfied no less than their eyes and their stomachs.

CHAPTER VI

INTERRUPTION IN CONVERSATION

_Its Deadening Effect on Conversation--Habitual
Interruption--Nervous Interruption--Glib Talkers--Interrupting by
Over-Accuracy--Interruptions Outside the
Conversation-Circle--Children and Their Interruption--Good Talk
at Table--Anecdotes of Children's Appreciation of Good
Conversation--The Hostess Who Is "Mistress of Herself Tho China
Fall."_

CHAPTER VI

INTERRUPTION IN CONVERSATION

Interruption, more surely than anything else, kills conversation. The
effusive talker who, in spite of his facility for words, is in no sense
a conversationalist, refuses to recognize the fact that conversation
involves a partnership; that in this company of joint interest each
party has a right to his turn in the conversational engagement. He
ignores his conversational partners; he breaks into their sentences with
his own speech before they have their words well out of their mouths. He
has grown so habitual in his interrupting that he rattles on
unconscious of the disgust he is producing in the mind of any
well-bred, discriminating conversationalist who hears him. The best of
talkers interrupt occasionally in conversation; but the unconscious,
rude interruption of the habitual interrupter,