ventionality.

It is doubtless a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel
and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is
not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for
surprise and little for emotion. O ye belles of Newport and of Bar
Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and
agreeable, are you wasting your sweet lives by rule? Is your compact,
graceful, orderly society liable to be monotonous in its gay repetition
of the same thing week after week? Is there nothing outside of that
envied circle which you make so brilliant? Is the Atlantic shore the only
coast where beauty may lounge and spread its net of enchantment? The
Atlantic shore and Europe? Perhaps on the Pacific you might come back to
your original selves, and find again that freedom and that charm of
individuality that are so attractive. Some sparkling summer morning, if
you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara,
inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved
shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind
you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of
Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and
palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden
and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air,
would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life
where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be
surprised? It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a whole
world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will
have no formula of experience. To take the journey is perhaps too heroic
treatment for the disease of conformity--the sort of malaria of our
exclusive civilization.

The Drawer is not urging this journey, nor any break-up of the social
order, for it knows how painful a return to individuality may be. It is
easier to go on in the subordination of one's personality to the strictly
conventional life. It expects rather to record a continually perfected
machinery, a life in which not only speech but ideas are brought into
rule. We have had something to say occasionally of the art of
conversation, which is in danger of being lost in the confused babel of
the reception and the chatter of the dinner-party--the art of listening
and the a