TALKING TO LADY NOVELISTS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 94, 22 April 1911, Page 10

TALKING TO LADY NOVELISTS.

So much has been said concerning the art of conversation that I very much doubt if it be an art at all. Conversation has been so systematised by the telephone that it seems a- mere trade. Anybody can talk well now even into a phonograph. One or two secrets of the subject are, for all that, known only to the elect, notwithstanding such clever books on conversation as that of Horatio S. Krans. I ani afraid Mr. Rrans has neglected the richest of all sources of conversation. I refer to tho works of our growing army of lady novelists — Alice Brown, Inez Haynes, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Atherton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman — but why compile a catalogue? These ladies are all exceedingly clever, and it is easy enough to learn how they like to be talked to. One has but to study the perfect gentlemen out of whom they make heroes in their innumerable novels. I will assume that I wanted to make myself agreeable conversationally to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. I have read her fiction co long and so patiently that I know only too well th© sort of things a man ought to say to seem brilliant to her. A dialogue between ue would race like the chariot of the sun. Thus : "Yes, yes, woman remains the great incomprehensible^ " "Not so fast, sir, I implore. When, you say incomprehensible, do you mean to men like yourself or to those high and ennobled souls who have made my sex their debtors 1" "Don't you mean creditors?" "Debtors, v I said." "Yes, and, being a woman, you meant something else." " But I am not aware that it is necessary for me to mean anything at all. You would be too obtuse to comprehend xa& if I did." "That sounds rude." "So it would have been in mamma's youth. Girls are permitted to be witty now." This, I affirm, after careful perusal of her works, is the art of conversation) to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. It goes a long way to "explain why we American, men seem dull to our wives and sisters. Now let me give a bit of dialogue between myself and Gertrude Atherton in her own most characteristic style: "Bo you mean to marry the heiress after all?" Here, after essaying to epeak', I hesitate. I know her awkward, handsome, English heroes so well ! "Yes," I answer shortly at last. Then, as an afterthought, "You know you urged me to." "Much urging you need to do what you should not do." "You mean I should not marry her? Whs' should 1 not marry her?" -* "It would be useless to tell you that until you had been, married to her a year." "You mean I am not clever enough to understand?" " "I mean that no man can unaerstand why h« should not marry a woman until it is too late, for the knowledge to do him any good." "Oh ! Then I am not clever?" "Do you suppose if you were ciever i. would talk to you like this?" "But how would you talk to me if I were clever?" "Fool ! Don't you see that if you were clever you would not have to ask the question? But ifc isn't a question. — ■ New York Life.