However, I am glad to think that Miss America does not seek to revive the spectacular talking such as women did in the days of the old French salons. A woman talking to a dozen men at the same time may have been a charming affair. Mme. Récamier is credited with having done it very well. But no sane and truthful man ever will admit his contentment with the microscopic fragment of a woman’s attention. Exclusive interest in a woman is undoubtedly a primitive instinct, yet the great deference paid to success in the _tête-à-tête_ well may justify this instinctive preference, and those hostesses surely will be most successful who devise some liberty for this instinct. The tendency of our social life is doubtless against centralization. There can be no more monologists, it seems. “The worst of hearing Carlyle,” said Margaret Fuller, “is that you cannot interrupt him.” The modern social gathering, whatever its aims or variations, is quite sure at least of this quality,--that it will interrupt. We cannot deny that even “One-Minute Conversations with Nice Girls” is an experience having its compensations as well as its drawbacks, for while a few eloquent seconds with many women may not be so desirable in some ways as many eloquent seconds with one woman, it always must be difficult to know beforehand just when this will be the case. Mr. Warner has shrewdly pointed out that some women are interesting for five minutes, some for ten, some for an hour; “some,” he adds, “are not exhausted in a whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence) are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine stupidity.” The trouble is (as you might guess) that the interruption always cuts you off at the end of three minutes with the girl who would be interesting for a whole day. For aught I know, society may have averaged this thing, and have discovered that the low limit is safest, that it leaves both parties most completely in possession of the benefit of the doubt. But how few men can start a new conversation every ninety seconds with anything like the success that attends a woman’s efforts to do the same thing?