Good Heavens! What else have we been trying to do all this time?
However, it is only the very young girl at her first dinner-party whom
it is difficult to entertain. At her second dinner-party, and
thereafter, she knows the whole art of being amusing. All she has to
do is to listen; all we men have to do is to tell her about ourselves.
Indeed, sometimes I think that it is just as well to begin at once.
Let us be quite frank about it, and get to work as soon as we are
introduced.
"How do you do. Lovely day it has been, hasn't it? It was on just
such a day as this, thirty-five years ago, that I was born in the
secluded village of Puddlecome of humble but honest parents. Nestling
among the western hills..."
And so on. Ending, at the dessert, with the thousand we earned that
morning.
The Etiquette of Escape
There is a girl in one of William de Morgan's books who interrupts the
narrator of a breathless tiger-hunting story with the rather
disconcerting warning, "I'm on the side of the tiger; I always am.
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