, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of
very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.

The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to
be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes
and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In
any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it,
and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one
can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and
women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to
easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's
meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on,
from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the
women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to
mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember,
and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they
seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people
who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do
anything else.

I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as
what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a
hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would
not be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. It
would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the
way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls,
switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in
three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are
listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or
expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all
around one as one goes out of the hall.

What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still
more true of words in books.

If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or
music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping
without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding
what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the
way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they
hea