This new country is a rushing, busy, hustling restless one. Not long ago I dined in America with an old friend I had not seen in some years. After dinner we walked into the library to have our coffee before the open fire. After we had sipped it and had a puff or two of our cigars, my host said, with the inevitability of after dinner New Yorkers, “Where do you want to go now?” I suggested that as I had not seen him for a long time I would much prefer to sit just where I was before the fire and talk to him. His reply was, “Thank Heaven. I haven’t had a good talk with anybody in ages.” Last year when home, a New York boy of about seventeen, a thoughtful lad, complained of his inability to find any men to talk with. “They always want to go somewhere or turn on the radio,” he commented. “How is a boy to learn if he can never talk to a man?” At least for ordinary conversation, there used to be the home, the piazza in the evenings or the tramp through the country.[Pg 231] The motor car, the small apartment and the rest of the factors in the new high standard have largely done away with such opportunities. But I think that, as far as good conversation, and not mere talk, is concerned, these are surface symptoms, secondary influences. Many elements are necessary for good conversation. For one thing there must be a sense of leisure. The talk may last only an hour, but an absence of any sense of hurry is essential. We may get through a business interview in five minutes, like rushing a bucket to a fire, but good talk should be like a stream on which we can float leisurely without knowing what may appear beyond the next bend. In order that there should be bends, however, each mind must have many interests. It is by no means necessary that the major interest of each of the talkers should be the same or even similar. As a rule, indeed, for the best of talk, it is just as well that they should not be. If they are, the talk is too apt to become and stay mere “shop.” The talkers, however, must have backgrounds that afford ample points of contact. One must be able to range over fields of fact and thought without having forever to be adding interpretative footnotes.