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o her house as do expensively purring motor-cars. "For," as she puts it, "I can stand the talk of the average woman in 'Society' just about fifteen minutes, and then I have to scream. I don't know how the fiction arose that American women of the leisure classes are so superior mentally to the women of other nations. The fact is, they are not. The fact is, that they are so superficial that a person who has really _done_ something--I don't mean who has played at it, but who has really under the spur of necessity got to the bottom of some one subject--can hardly endure their conversation. They chatter, chatter, chatter, about everything under heaven, and if you happen to know anything about any of the subjects, it is simply torture to listen. "Life is too short, and too interesting, and the world too full of real people, to bother with the folks who don't know their business. The man or woman who has had to be self-supporting has got to the bottom of some branch of activity, however small, and learned humility. To learn that mastery of even a tiny subject requires effort and concentration and skill, is to learn respect for other subjects; and it is to learn, too, how to listen. "Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested, and who hasn't the grasp of mind to appreciate the complexities of a craft not his own, who doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't know anything. If I'm going to talk my shop, I want to talk it with folks who've been in it. If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed, it must be by someone who is familiar with that, not by directoired dabblers who, you feel after three minutes have elapsed, don't know a thing about the subject. If politeness consists in letting them suppose that I take any stock in what they say, then I plead guilty to being a boor." Probably no one who has experienced the awful ordeal of listening to some female chatter about his chosen subject, or who has undergone the even worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts of his own into the deep, deep pools of her incomprehension, will fail of sympathy with my friend. "But I tire you," said an incessant gabbler one day to the great Duc de Broglie. "No, no," replied the duke; "I wasn't listening." [Illustration] _On Giving up Golf Forever_ Last season I gave up golf forever two days before our course opened in May, on the evenings of June 17th and July 4th,
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