s people, who insist upon giving you the tiresome details of
insipid trivialities! There is no escape from them; they are
everywhere. They are to be found on farms, in mining-camps, in women's
clubs, in churches, jails, and lunatic asylums, and the nearest
approach to a release from them is to be fashionable, for in society
nobody ever is allowed to finish a sentence.

This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory. None
other can account for its universality. You can carry contagion of it
in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental constitution,
who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she
will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit. There
is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases
about it--such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly. It is
rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you
a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for
fifty years and then die of something else.

I never heard of a yacht which did not carry at least one of this
particular breed of bores upon every trip. I never heard of a
private-car party which was free from it. Or, if you do not carry them
with you, you meet them on the way, and they ruin the sunset for the
whole party.

Something ought to be done about it. There ought to be a poll-tax on
bores. Mothers ought to train their children to avoid lying and boring
people with equal earnestness. Infirmaries should be established for
the purpose of making the stupid interesting, or classes organized on
"How to be Brief," or on "The Art of Relating Salient Points," or on
"The Best Method of Skipping the Unessentials in Conversation."
_I_ would go, for one.

I quite envy a man who is an acknowledged bore. He is so free from
responsibility. _He_ does not care that the conversation dies every
time he shows his face. He is used to it. It is nothing to him that
clever men and women ache audibly in his presence. _He_ has no
reputation to lose. The hostess is not a friend of his, for whom he
feels that he must exert himself. A bore _has_ no friends. He is a
social leech.

It implies, first of all, a superb conceit to think anybody wishes one
to tell all about anything, but conceit is a natural attribute--a twin
brother of its sister, vanity--and everybody has it to a greater or
less degree. Indeed, the cleverest man I know--quite the cleverest