If one cannot be animated without rapid
speech, let him talk fast. It is a bad practice, however, even in the
ablest talkers.
One can have opinions, and yet not use them to knock down one's
opponents who have had no chance to arm against one. Do not be
ungenerous, girls, selfish, in talking. Allow that some one else may
have ideas as good as yours. George Eliot says, in "Daniel Deronda,"
"I cannot bear people to keep their minds bottled up for the sake of
letting them off with a pop." That is not conversation: it is a selfish
display of a few treasured maxims or witticisms or opinions.
If courtesy, deference, patience, and generosity are needed to talk
well, then certainly sympathy is necessary. A woman who has no
comfortable word for her sister woman had better talk to the wall.
But I need not reproach girls for lack of sympathy, nor for lack of
interest in the girls they meet. Their confidence in new friends is
so absolute; their desire to receive sympathy, as well as to give it,
is so great, that they frequently impart their whole lists of secrets
to the bosoms of others whom they have not known a month. Now a more
careful use of sympathy and confidence will induce not only good manners
but good talk. It will tell you how to avoid such subjects as would
give rise to unpleasant, even quarrelsome, talk. It will show you when
you have talked too long with one person in a mixed company, and when
you are wounding the feelings of another by paying no regard to her.
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