e as would transform the experimenter
into a Bore Negative of the most negative description. Practically
deprived of speech, he would become like a Charlie Wax endowed with
locomotion and provided with letters of introduction. But one can at
least curb the pronoun, and, with shrewd covert glances at his
wrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myself
within reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I will
not talk about Myself for more than thirty minutes by my wrist-watch';
then reduce it to twenty-five; then to twenty--and so on to the
irreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularity
increases with leaps and bounds at each reduction--provided, of course,
that he finds anything else to talk about.

Your Complete Bore, however, is incapable of this treatment, for he does
not know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive,
well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head lies
sleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and over
so apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel from
blowing his trumpet. So it seems to him in his bed; but alas, these
dialogues are never of any practical use. They comfort, but they do not
cure. For no person ever talks to us as we talk to ourselves. The
better way is to decide firmly (1) to get a wrist-watch, and (2) to get
to sleep.

There is, however, one infallible rule for not being a bore,--or at any
rate for not being much of a bore,--and that is, never to make a call,
or talk to one person, or to several at once, for more than fifteen
minutes. Fifteen minutes is not really a very long time, although it may
seem so. But to apply this rule successfully one must become adept in
the Fine Art of Going Away. Resting your left hand negligently on your
right knee, so that the wrist protrudes with an effect of careless grace
from the cuff, you have glanced at your watch and observed that the
fifteen minutes are up. You get up yourself. Others get up--or, if there
is but one other, she. So far, so good. But now that everybody is up,
new subjects of conversation, as if catching this rising infection, come
up also. You are in a position in which, except by rather too oratorical
or dramatic a gesture, you cannot look at your watch; more than that, if
you bore a person sitting down and wondering when you are going to get
up, you bore far worse a person standing up and wond