ng. The educated not only use a softened mode of speech, but they
avoid repeating remarks, unless with a discerning wish to be helpful to
others. The cultivated who have brought life to a far higher point than
the uncultivated have protected their liberty by a social rule. They say
what they like, and it does not get to the ears of the person about whom
they have said it. And if it did it wouldn't much matter. Criticism
which is critically given is usually critically received. The
maliciousness of adverse criticism seldom lies in the person who voices
it, but in the person who carries a tale. The moment sophisticated
people learn that one among them has venomously repeated an adversely
critical remark, they immediately know that that person is not to the
manner born. There is no surer proof.

If the born advocate is not always a saint, the born critic is not
always a sinner. Robert Louis Stevenson understood the importance of
the personal touch in conversation when he wrote: "So far as
conversational subjects are truly talkable, more than half of them may
be reduced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that there are
other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either." So,
also, did Mr. J. M. Barrie, when he told us that his beloved Margaret
Ogilvy, in spite of no personal interest in Gladstone, "had a profound
faith in him as an aid to conversation. If there were silent men in the
company, she would give him to them to talk about precisely as she would
divide a cake among children."

It is often hinted by men that women are made good conversationalists by
a sense of irresponsibility. But I am inclined to think that a little
gossip now and then is relished by the best of men as well as women.
The tendency to gossip with which men constantly credit women, and in
which tendency the men themselves keep pace, helps both men and women
very effectually to good conversation. "It is more important," says
Stevenson again, "that a person should be a good gossip and talk
pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one
nothings of the day and hour, than speak with the tongues of men and
angels.... Talk is the creature of the street and market-place, feeding
on gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That
is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions;
but still gossip because it turns on personalities."

Gossip, we must admit, has a perennial