t are so attractive. Some sparkling summer morning, if
you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara,
inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved
shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind
you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of
Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and
palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden
and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air,
would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life
where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be
surprised? It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a whole
world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will
have no formula of experience. To take the journey is perhaps too heroic
treatment for the disease of conformity--the sort of malaria of our
exclusive civilization.

The Drawer is not urging this journey, nor any break-up of the social
order, for it knows how painful a return to individuality may be. It is
easier to go on in the subordination of one's personality to the strictly
conventional life. It expects rather to record a continually perfected
machinery, a life in which not only speech but ideas are brought into
rule. We have had something to say occasionally of the art of
conversation, which is in danger of being lost in the confused babel of
the reception and the chatter of the dinner-party--the art of listening
and the art of talking both being lost. Society is taking alarm at this,
and the women as usual are leaders in a reform. Already, by reason of
clubs-literary, scientific, economic--woman is the well-informed part of
our society. In the "Conversation Lunch" this information is now brought
into use. The lunch, and perhaps the dinner, will no longer be the
occasion of satisfying the appetite or of gossip, but of improving talk.
The giver of the lunch will furnish the topic of conversation. Two
persons may not speak at once; two persons may not talk with each other;
all talk is to be general and on the topic assigned, and while one is
speaking, the others must listen. Perhaps each lady on taking her seat
may find in her napkin a written slip of paper which shall be the guide
to her remarks. Thus no time is to be wasted on frivolous topics. The
ordinary natural flow of rejoinder and repart