I paused and gave myself more air.
"How are you," I asked, "on hydrostatics?"
"I beg your pardon," she said. Evidently she was ignorant
again.
"Have you ever studied the principles of aerial navigation?"
I asked.
"No," She answered.
I was pausing again and trying to invest myself with an
air of further interest, when another man was introduced
to her, quite evidently, from his appearance, a vapid
jackass without one tenth of the brain calibre that I
have.
"Oh, how do you do?" he said. "I say, I've just heard
that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn't it?"
In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How
do these silly asses do it?
When Dressed Hogs are Dull
An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often
overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties
to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important
and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.
The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set
man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name
Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in
his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have
to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to
my mind the head-line of the market reports in the
newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull.
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