HOW TO BE ENTERTAINING

To know how to entertain people is a talent; but there is one better,
and which makes you still more popular with your friends and
acquaintances--it is that talent which consists in drawing them out and
allowing them to entertain you.

I know very clever people, not exactly conceited or assertive, but who
have the objectionable knack of gently sitting upon you. Their opinions
are given with an _ex cathedra_ air that seems to exclude any appeal
against them.

Sometimes they tell anecdotes very well, and they give you strings of
them, each one bridged over to the other by a 'That reminds me.' They
laugh at their anecdotes heartily, and invite you to do so with such a
suggestion as 'That's a good one, isn't it?'

You do laugh, and you hope for your reward, that you will be able to
tell a little anecdote yourself. Sometimes they will cut you short and
go on with another; sometimes they will give you a chance, show little
signs of impatience while you give it, and never laugh when you have
finished.

Worse than that, they will occasionally say: 'Oh yes,' on the tune of 'I
have heard that one before,' or, maybe, 'Why, I am the inventor of it
myself.' I have known such clever people and good anecdote tellers to
prove terrific bores.

Whether you are discussing a question or merely spending a little time
telling stories over a cup of coffee and a couple of cigarettes, you
like to be allowed to prove alive, and the really entertaining people
are those who know how to make you enjoy yourself as well as their
company.

You are grateful to those friends who give you a chance of shining
yourself, and there are some who know not only how to draw you out, but
who know how to do it to the extent of making you brilliant.

Those who make you feel like an idiot are no better than those who take
you for one. Although they do not do it on purpose, the result is
exactly the same as if they did. You find that kind of man in every walk
of life.

There is the savant who pours forth science by the gallon and talks you
deaf, dumb, and lame. There is the other kind also. I once spent an hour
talking on philology with the greatest professor of the College of
France in Paris.

I know a little philology, but my knowledge of that science compared to
his is about in the proportion of the length of my little finger to that
of his whole body, and he is over six feet. He put me so much at my
ease; he so many time