ally taciturn, provided he
is one who can be roused to conversation when thrown with talkable
people. Otherwise one of the hosts should devote himself to the business
of promoting talk with the uncommunicative but no less interesting
person. A wise hostess will consider this matter of seating guests in
connection with selecting and inviting them. It is, therefore, one of
the subordinate and purely mechanical processes of the real art of
amalgamation.

If hosts forget nothing that will tempt a guest to his comfort, they
will remember above all the quarter of an hour before dinner, and will
begin the actual conquest of amalgamation while their friends are
assembling. By animation and cordiality they will put congenial guests
in conversation with each other, and will bring forth their mines of
things old and new, coining the ore into various sums, large and small,
as may be needed.

In some highly cultured circles, men and women are supposed to be
sufficiently educated and entertaining to require no literary or
childish aids to conversation. Every dinner-giver, however, knows the
device of suitable quotations, or original sayings, or clever limericks,
on place-cards, and the impetus they give to conversation between
dinner-companions as the guests are seated. But the responsibility of
host and hostess does not end when they thus furnish dinner-companions a
conversational cue. "This is why," as has been well said by Canon
Ainger, "a dinner party to be good for anything, beyond the mere
enjoyment of the menu, should be neither too large nor too small. Some
forgotten genius laid it down that the number should never be less than
that of the Graces, nor more than that of the Muses, and the latter half
of the epigram may be safely accepted. Ten as a maximum, eight for
perfection; for then conversation can be either dialog, or may spread
and become general, and the host or hostess has to direct no more than
can profitably be watched over. It is the dinner party of sixteen to
twenty that is so terrible a risk.... Good general conversation at table
among a few is now rather the exception, from the common habit of
crowding our rooms or our tables and getting rid of social obligations
as if they were commercial debts. Indeed many of our young people have
so seldom heard a general conversation that they grow up in the belief
that their only duty in society will be to talk to one man or woman at a
time. So serious are the results of