n account of their intelligence, agreeableness, and
power of entertaining each other. They come together, not for exercise,
but pleasure, and the more they crowd and jam and struggle, and the
louder they scream, the greater the pleasure. It is a kind of contest,
full of good-humor and excitement. The one that has the shrillest voice
and can scream the loudest is most successful. It would seem at first
that they are under a singular hallucination, imagining that the more
noise there is in the room the better each one can be heard, and so each
one continues to raise his or her voice in order to drown the other
voices. The secret of the game is to pitch the voice one or two octaves
above the ordinary tone. Some throats cannot stand this strain long; they
become rasped and sore, and the voices break; but this adds to the
excitement and enjoyment of those who can scream with less inconvenience.
The angel would notice that if at any time silence was called, in order
that an announcement of music could be made, in the awful hush that
followed people spoke to each other in their natural voices, and
everybody could be heard without effort. But this was not the object of
the Reception, and in a moment more the screaming would begin again, the
voices growing higher and higher, until, if the roof were taken off, one
vast shriek would go up to heaven.

This is not only a fashion, it is an art. People have to train for it,
and as it is a unique amusement, it is worth some trouble to be able to
succeed in it. Men, by reason of their stolidity and deeper voices, can
never be proficients in it; and they do not have so much practice--unless
they are stock-brokers. Ladies keep themselves in training in their
ordinary calls. If three or four meet in a drawing-room they all begin to
scream, not that they may be heard--for the higher they go the less they
understand each other--but simply to acquire the art of screaming at
receptions. If half a dozen ladies meeting by chance in a parlor should
converse quietly in their sweet, ordinary home tones, it might be in a
certain sense agreeable, but it would not be fashionable, and it would
not strike the prevailing note of our civilization. If it were true that
a group of women all like to talk at the same time when they meet (which
is a slander invented by men, who may be just as loquacious, but not so
limber-tongued and quick-witted), and raise their voices to a shriek in
order to dominate each ot