and the unintentional,
conscious interruption of the cultivated talker are easily discernible,
and are two very different things.

We are accustomed to think that children are the only offenders in
interrupting; but, shades of the French _salon_, the crimes of the
adults! The great pity about this positive phase of interrupting is that
all habitual interrupters are totally unconscious that they continually
break into the speeches of their conversers and literally knock their
very words back into their mouths. Robert Louis Stevenson pronounced
this eulogy over his friend, James Walter Ferrier: "He was the only man
I ever knew who did not habitually interrupt." Now, you who read this
may not believe that you are one of the violators of this first
commandment of good conversation, "thou shalt not interrupt"; but stop
to think what small chance you have of escape when only _one_
acquaintance of Stevenson's was acquitted of this crime. One must become
conscious of the fact that he continually interrupts before he can cease
interrupting. The unconsciousness is what constitutes the crime; for
conscious interruption ceases to be interruption. The moment a good
talker is aware of having broken into the speech of his converser, he
forestalls interruption by waiting to hear what was about to be said. He
instantly cuts off his own speech with the conventional courtesy-phrase,
"I beg your pardon," which is the same as saying, "Pardon me for seeming
to be unwilling to listen to you; I really am both willing and glad to
hear what you have to say." And he proves his willingness by waiting
until the other person can finish the thought he ventured upon. What
better proof that conversation is listening as well as talking?

Sheer, nervous inability to listen is responsible for one phase of
interruption to conversation. It is the interruption of the wandering
eye which tells that one's words have not been heard. "The person next
to you must be bored by my conversation, for it is going into one of
your ears and out of the other," said a talker rather testily to his
inattentive dinner-companion whose absent-minded and tardy replies had
been snapping the thread of the thought until it grew intolerable. She
was perhaps only a little less irritating than the man who became so
unconscious in the habit of inattention that on one occasion his
converser had scarcely finished when he began abstractedly: "Yes, very
odd, very odd," and told the identi