l have reserved
his verbal scourging for more irritating forms of impertinent
interruption, it is nevertheless true that people are more entirely
considerate who allow their conversational partners to finish their
statements without fear of being tript up.

It is only lack of discrimination on the part of glib talkers to suppose
that those who express themselves more deliberately are less interesting
in conversation. The pig is one of the most rapidly loquacious of
animals, yet no one would say that the pig is an attractive
conversationalist. Pope may have been slow in forming the mosaic of
symbols which express so superbly the fact that

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found,"

but his deliberateness did not dim the wisdom, or interest, or beauty,
of his lines. Slow talkers, if allowed to express themselves in their
own way, only add to the attractiveness of any group. Why should we
enjoy characterization more in literature and in drama than in life?
"Good talking," says Stevenson, "is declarative of the man; it is
dramatic like an impromptu piece of acting where each should represent
himself to the greatest advantage; and that is the best kind of talk
where each speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, if you
should shift the speeches round from one to another, there would be the
greatest loss in significance and perspicuity."

The Gradgrinds of society who are always coming down upon us with some
horrible and unnecessary piece of fact are another form of interruption
to good conversation. They stop you to remind you that the accident
happened in Tremont Street, not in Boylston; and they suspend a
pertinent point in the air to inform you that it was Mr. Jones's eldest
sister, not his youngest, who was abroad at the time of the San
Francisco earthquake. If some one refers to an incident as having
occurred on the tenth of the month, they deem it necessary to stop the
talker because they happen to know that it was on the ninth. People are
often their own Gradgrinds, interrupting themselves in the midst of a
narration to correct some trivial mistake which has no bearing one way
or the other on what they are saying.

Many otherwise good talkers are at times afflicted with aphasia and lose
the simplest and most familiar word at just the crucial moment--the very
word which is necessary to the point they wish to make. This happens
more often wi