table
companionship.

And then, also, there is wit that is not wit. As someone has written:

Nor ever noise for wit on me could pass,
When thro' the braying I discern'd the ass.

I sat lately at dinner with a notoriously witty person (a really witty
man) whom our hostess had introduced to provide the entertainment. I
had read many of his reviews of books and plays, and while I confess
their wit and brilliancy, I had thought them to be hard and
intellectual and lacking in all that broader base of humor which aims
at truth. His writing--catching the bad habit of the time--is too
ready to proclaim a paradox and to assert the unusual, to throw aside
in contempt the valuable haystack in a fine search for a paltry
needle. His reviews are seldom right--as most of us see the right--but
they sparkle and hold one's interest for their perversity and
unexpected turns.

In conversation I found him much as I had found him in his
writing--although, strictly speaking, it was not a conversation, which
requires an interchange of word and idea and is turn about. A
conversation should not be a market where one sells and another buys.
Rather, it should be a bargaining back and forth, and each person
should be both merchant and buyer. My rubber plant for your victrola,
each offering what he has and seeking his deficiency. It was my friend
B---- who fairly put the case when he said that he liked so much to
talk that he was willing to pay for his audience by listening in his
turn.

But this was a speech and a lecture. He loosed on us from the cold
spigot of his intellect a steady flow of literary allusion--a practice
which he professes to hold in scorn--and wit and epigram. He seemed
torn from the page of Meredith. He talked like ink. I had believed
before that only people in books could talk as he did, and then only
when their author had blotted and scratched their performance for a
seventh time before he sent it to the printer. To me it was an
entirely new experience, for my usual acquaintances are good common
honest daytime woollen folk and they seldom average better than one
bright thing in an evening.

At first I feared that there might be a break in his flow of speech
which I should be obliged to fill. Once, when there was a slight
pause--a truffle was engaging him--I launched a frail remark; but it
was swept off at once in the renewed torrent. And seriously it does
not seem fair. If one speaker insists--to change the fi