Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/110

 spurted out between the entrées and the game!—talk to be either checked by waiters proffering more food, or drowned in the musical growling of the band! I believe one man hazarded a joke,—but it was not heard,—and I know that a witty old Irish peer told an anecdote which was promptly "quashed" by a dish of asparagus being thrust before him, just as he was, in the richest brogue, arriving at the "point." But as nobody listened to him, it did not matter. Nobody does listen to anybody or anything nowadays at social functions. Everybody talks with insane, babbling eagerness, apparently indifferent as to whether they are heard or not. Any amount of people ask questions and never think of waiting for the answers. Should any matters, small or great, require explanation, scarce a soul has the patience or courtesy to attend to such explanation or to follow it with any lucidity or comprehension. It is all hurry-skurry, helter-skelter, and bad, shockingly bad, manners.

I am given to understand that Americans, and Americans alone, retain and cherish the old-fashioned grace of Hospitality, which is so rapidly becoming extinct in Great Britain. I would fain believe this, but of myself I do not know. I have had no experience of social America, save such as has been freely and cordially taught me by Americans in London. Some of these have indeed proved that they possess the art of entertaining friends with real friendly delight in the grace and charm and mutual help of social intercourse,—others again, by an inordinate display of wealth, and a feverish yearning for the Paragraph-Man (or Woman), have plainly shown that Hospitality is, with them, a far