Alas! it would be a good thing if sipping tea for a whole afternoon in one room were the worst sin practised by our young women. Sipping tea in a dozen rooms on the same afternoon is surely a worse matter. In the days when people gave up a whole afternoon to a call, conversational stitching and tea drinking were reduced to a science, and gossip to a fine art. In a later day, when the author of the Synthetic Philosophy found occasion to marvel over and to lament the velocity with which men and women were going about their affairs in this country, calling customs had utterly changed. If our women had undertaken to perpetuate throughout the year the New Year’s Day habits of the sociable Dutch of Manhattan, they could not have been more successful. The potency of pasteboard and the human imagination have not greatly diminished the pressure, and will not so long as the intoxication of mere rapidity continues to preserve its power. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has colloquially expressed the distressing celerity with which certain classes of fashionable women rush in, laugh, talk, eat and disappear, in the tersely alliterative “giggle, gabble, gobble, git.” These habits are, of course, utterly destructive of good talk. Modern society talk under the pressure of numbers and a consent to oscillate violently, is like the scattered fragments of a word game. A man--I cannot speak for a woman--emerges from a “crush” with fresh emotions toward the grotesquely ironical definition of words as the vehicle of thought. [Illustration: Gossip]