THINGS WE TALK ABOUT.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 237, 6 October 1928, Page 8

THINGS WE TALK ABOUT.

■Edith SitweH,in the latest "Women's Journal," writes an interesting article entitled "How Old Will You Be Next Tear!" Here is an extract which gave this writer "to think": "A certain amount of experience has taught me that time is elastic. How often when I have been dragged to a dinner party have I left this house in the middle of my usual age, which is ; —well, never mind—and in the middle of dinner have felt myself aged a thousand at least. At the end of the evening a thousand years seemed, comparatively speaking, young, and I left the house feeling and looking older.than Cleopatra, but not, alas, nearly so good-looking. . . . Wisdom whispers her warning in my ear that even the best silk elastic if stretched too often and too muck wears out; and that if I continue to allow other people to play tricks with my time, it is my face which will suffer, not theirs."

Is there even one of us who has not had cause to know exactly what the brilliant writer means? Is there any one of us-who has done anything about it, rail at the dull, tiresome evenings as we may? You know the kind of evening which, it seems, no power on earth can prevent. Things, and in the case in mind that means conversation, went wrong from the very beginning. There was a perfect wallowing in banalities. Each in turn (with, say, two exceptions) made valiant efforts to turn that wasteful stream into fresh channels, with conspicuous failure. 'It was like a swollen, muddy freshet overflowing its legitimate banks. A mental paralysis enveloped you like a blanket soaked in seawater. Each hour you grew older and sadder; you were even too miserable to feel sleepy. Nay, your critical sense was too acutely awake; it was calling, you all sorts of doddering imbeciles—"Can't you do anything?" it kept hounding at you. Of course there is almost always a person, or it may be two persons, responsible' for keeping a ball of fuzzy wool in the air. They are folk with splendid breaking apparatus, a continuous supply of "hot air" which enables them to blow that ball from one to the other in spite of cold, adverse winds from other quarters. Sometimes they are simply persons who are not aware of what they' are doing; they are just made like that. But sometimes it is a malicious conspiracy to annoy persons present.

Quito furthest from my mind is a "highbrow" evening, where each guest is going one tetter than tho other in art, music or literature. Not at all—that would be a dreadful alternative which could bo almost as boring as the other —but a whole evening spent in saying and listening to the kind of things one says in a minute's chat in passing in the street or car is indeed a waste of hours. It seems to me that no evening's conversation is perfect without a good spice of humour and laughter. The latter certainly lifts the years. After advising her readers to preserve youth of mind and heart, Edith Sitwell quaintly finishes her article thus:. ". . . Twenty-five (the appearance)—given . favourable circumstances — that is how old I shall be next year." —G. EDITH BURTON.