that Harvard beat Princeton this afternoon. Great, isn't it?"

   In two minutes they were talking like old friends. How
do these silly asses do it?

   When Dressed Hogs are Dull

   An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, often
overheard at receptions, is where one of the two parties
to it is too surly, too stupid, or too self-important
and too rich to talk, and the other labours in vain.

   The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, thick-set
man of the type that anybody recognizes under the name
Money Hog. This kind of person, as viewed standing in
his dress suit, mannerless and stupid, too rich to have
to talk and too dull to know how to, always recalls to
my mind the head-line of the market reports in the
newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull."

   The other party to the conversation is a winsome and
agreeable woman, trying her best to do her social duty.

   But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z—— would say, I can
exactly illustrate the position and attitude of the two
of them from a recollection of my childhood. I remember
that in one of my nursery books of forty years ago there
was a picture entitled "The Lady in Love With A Swine."
A willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over the rail
of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an impossibly clean
hog stood in an attitude of ill-mannered immobility. With
the picture was the rhyming legend,

   There was a Lady in love with a swine,

   "Honey," said she, "will you be mine?

   I'll build you a silver sty

   And in it you shall lie."

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