o her house as do expensively purring
motor-cars.

"For," as she puts it, "I can stand the talk of the average woman in
'Society' just about fifteen minutes, and then I have to scream. I
don't know how the fiction arose that American women of the leisure
classes are so superior mentally to the women of other nations. The
fact is, they are not. The fact is, that they are so superficial that
a person who has really _done_ something--I don't mean who has played
at it, but who has really under the spur of necessity got to the
bottom of some one subject--can hardly endure their conversation. They
chatter, chatter, chatter, about everything under heaven, and if you
happen to know anything about any of the subjects, it is simply
torture to listen.

"Life is too short, and too interesting, and the world too full of
real people, to bother with the folks who don't know their business.
The man or woman who has had to be self-supporting has got to the
bottom of some branch of activity, however small, and learned
humility. To learn that mastery of even a tiny subject requires
effort and concentration and skill, is to learn respect for other
subjects; and it is to learn, too, how to listen.

"Nobody can listen who isn't truly interested, and who hasn't the
grasp of mind to appreciate the complexities of a craft not his own,
who doesn't know enough to know when he doesn't know anything. If I'm
going to talk my shop, I want to talk it with folks who've been in it.
If I'm going to hear some other shop discussed, it must be by someone
who is familiar with that, not by directoired dabblers who, you feel
after three minutes have elapsed, don't know a thing about the
subject. If politeness consists in letting them suppose that I take
any stock in what they say, then I plead guilty to being a boor."

Probably no one who has experienced the awful ordeal of listening to
some female chatter about his chosen subject, or who has undergone the
even worse ordeal of dropping great thoughts of his own into the deep,
deep pools of her incomprehension, will fail of sympathy with my
friend.

"But I tire you," said an incessant gabbler one day to the great Duc
de Broglie.

"No, no," replied the duke; "I wasn't listening."

[Illustration]

_On Giving up Golf Forever_

Last season I gave up golf forever two days before our course opened
in May, on the evenings of June 17th and July 4th,