So soon as we grasp the fact that Miss America can look _and_ talk, we are in a fair way to understand some of the secrets of her power. It is quite generally admitted that she talks well, and very seldom, I think, with any disparaging reservation. She is a good talker. She is more; she is a good conversationalist, for she can listen. If speech is silver and silence is golden, I am free to admit that Miss America does not seem to believe altogether in the gold standard. She appears to be somewhat of a bi-metallist. I don’t blame her; and I always admire her method of dealing with men who believe in the free silver of continuous talk. Her reserve here is characteristic of her agreeable poise in society whenever and wherever she is called upon to say the right thing at the right time. She never exhibits stage fright, though she has confessed (afterward) to the symptoms. If, like Isabella, she is “loth to speak so indirectly,” she doesn’t show it. She may, indeed, like the Venus of Melos, be disarmed, but she never will be found, like the Winged Victory, to have lost her head. Foreigners sometimes have said that Miss America talks too loudly, but I am sure that this effect arises from her vivacity, and one might retort that if her enunciation ever is more than necessarily audible the chances are all in favor of your being glad that you did not miss a word. [Illustration] Sometimes she has a way of talking to you at an oblique angle. She likes to banter while she pours tea, for example, parrying and thrusting with the agility of one of those Viennese girls who know how to fence with a blade in each hand. When Mme. De Staël declared that conversation, “like talent, exists only in France,” Miss America had not grown up. It still is true, probably, as Mrs. Poyser pointed out, that a woman “can count a stocking top while a man’s gitting his tongue ready.” Man’s development has been distressingly slow. He never has met but indifferently the supreme test of the _tête-à-tête_. It may be that his habits of life dispose him to take an exaggerated, sometimes even a morbid, view of the hazard of words. Regarding the situation solemnly is fatal to facility. The situation is not, and cannot be, intrinsically solemn, being devised to get away from solemnity. The talk is no more momentous than the tea. Neither is an end, but only a means. “It grieves my heart,” cried Addison, “to see a couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.” Now this comment, surely, represents a most unwholesome frame of mind, subversive of that relaxation which Delsarte and many charming women disciples have bidden us cultivate. [Illustration]