The current change of society is the light coin of “small talk” that breaks with chink and shimmer the heavy bills of large denomination, that else would overwhelm social conversation with their size.
Wiseacres may meet and learnedly discourse on all manner of sage subjects, but that is discussion, debate, argument, what you will, not conversation. Conversation is light, brilliant, and tossed back and forth from one to another with the grace and ease of the feathered shuttlecock.
A lady of high literary attainments was seen in a gay gathering sitting quietly by herself in a corner, and, being questioned by a friend as to her silence, replied, half bitterly, “I have no ‘small change,’ and my bank bills are all of too large denomination for the occasion.” This is a difficulty that one should strive to overcome, for, after all, it is small change, rather than bank bills, that society in general requires.
Given the foundation of even a moderate education, the aspirant for social success will gain more ideas from modern fiction than from any other source whatever. No historian presents the social manners and customs of his time with half the accuracy displayed by our best fiction writers. A well-known society woman, familiar with its usages both at home and abroad, declares that “a course of Anthony Trollope is as good as a London season,” and we all know that Howells and James and other authors of that ilk have lifted the _portières_ of our own drawing rooms and shown us what is transpiring therein. Gail Hamilton says that to be “well-smattered” is next best to being deeply learned, and nowhere can a smattering of almost everything be better gained than from the modern works of fiction.
A friend of the writer, a talented elocutionist, and socially brilliant, once said with reference to her quiet country home and her sudden emergence therefrom to mingle in Washington society, that she found herself perfectly at ease in those circles so widely different from her previous experience of life, and that “she attributed it wholly to her knowledge of social customs and the social atmosphere, as gained from the best society stories.” It was in this manner that she served her social novitiate and the result bore testimony to its efficacy.
