us facts which will pleasantly
beguile the time. Here, in the interest of Society, we feel bound to
enter a formal protest. Nobody, even in the provinces, should ever be
allowed to ask an intelligent question about pure mathematics across a
dinner-table. A question of this kind is quite as bad as inquiring
suddenly about the state of a man's soul, a sort of coup which, as Mr.
Mahaffy remarks elsewhere, 'many pious people have actually thought a
decent introduction to a conversation.'

As for the moral qualifications of a good talker, Mr. Mahaffy, following
the example of his great master, warns us against any disproportionate
excess of virtue. Modesty, for instance, may easily become a social
vice, and to be continually apologising for one's ignorance or stupidity
is a grave injury to conversation, for, 'what we want to learn from each
member is his free opinion on the subject in hand, not his own estimate
of the value of that opinion.' Simplicity, too, is not without its
dangers. The enfant terrible, with his shameless love of truth, the raw
country-bred girl who always says what she means, and the plain, blunt
man who makes a point of speaking his mind on every possible occasion,
without ever considering whether he has a mind at all, are the fatal
examples of what simplicity leads to. Shyness may be a form of vanity,
and reserve a development of pride, and as for sympathy, what can be more
detestable than the man, or woman, who insists on agreeing with
everybody, and so makes 'a discussion, which implies differences in
opinion,' absolutely impossible? Even the unselfish listener is apt to
become a bore. 'These silent people,' says Mr. Mahaffy, 'not only take
all they can get in Society for nothing, but they take it without the
smallest gratitude, and have the audacity afterwards to censure those who
have laboured for their amusement.' Tact, which is an exquisite sense of
the symmetry of things, is, according to Mr. Mahaffy, the highest and
best of all the moral conditions for conversation. The man of tact, he
most wisely remarks, 'will instinctively avoid jokes about Blue Beard' in
the company of a woman who is a man's third wife; he will never be guilty
of talking like a book, but will rather avoid too careful an attention to
grammar and the rounding of periods; he will cultivate the art of
graceful interruption, so as to prevent a subject being worn threadbare
by the aged or the inexperienced; and should h