ew generation with new manners began to make its
appearance. A number of its members had been educated at English
universities, and came home burning to upset old ways and teach their
elders how to live. They broke away from the old clubs and started
smaller and more exclusive circles among themselves, principally in the
country. This was a period of bad manners. True to their English model,
they considered it "good form" to be uncivil and to make no effort
towards the general entertainment when in society. Not to speak more
than a word or two during a dinner party to either of one's neighbors was
the supreme _chic_. As a revolt from the twice-told tales of their
elders they held it to be "bad form" to tell a story, no matter how fresh
and amusing it might be. An unfortunate outsider who ventured to tell
one in their club was crushed by having his tale received in dead
silence. When it was finished one of the party would "ring the bell,"
and the circle order drinks at the expense of the man who had dared to
amuse them. How the professional story-teller must have shuddered--he
whose story never was ripe until it had been told a couple of hundred
times, and who would produce a certain tale at a certain course as surely
as clock-work.

That the story-telling type was a bore, I grant. To be grabbed on
entering your club and obliged to listen to Smith's last, or to have the
conversation after dinner monopolized by Jones and his eternal "Speaking
of coffee, I remember once," etc. added an additional hardship to
existence. But the opposite pose, which became the fashion among the
reformers, was hardly less wearisome. To sit among a group of perfectly
mute men, with an occasional word dropping into the silence like a stone
in a well, was surely little better.

A girl told me she had once sat through an entire cotillion with a youth
whose only remark during the evening had been (after absorbed
contemplation of the articles in question), "How do you like my socks?"

On another occasion my neighbor at table said to me:

"I think the man on my right has gone to sleep. He is sitting with his
eyes closed!" She was mistaken. He was practising his newly acquired
"repose of manner," and living up to the standard of his set.

The model young man of that period had another offensive habit, his pose
of never seeing you, which got on the nerves of his elders to a
considerable extent. If he came into a drawing-room where