green vista, all bathed in shimmering sunshine, with the dark head
of a mountain at the top. So in the best talk one has a sudden
sight of something high, sweet, serious, austere.

The other kind of talk that I find very disagreeable is the talk of
a full-fledged egotist, who converses without reference to his
hearers, and brings out what is in his mind. One gets interesting
things in this way from time to time; but the essence, as I have
said, of good talk is that one should have provoking and
stimulating peeps into other minds, not that one should be
compelled to gaze and stare into them. I have a friend, or rather
an acquaintance, whose talk is just as if he opened a trap-door
into his mind: you look into a dark place where something flows,
stream or sewer; sometimes it runs clear and brisk, but at other
times it seems to be charged with dirt and debris; and yet there is
no escape; you have to stand and look, to breathe the very odours
of the mind, until he chooses to close the door.

The mistake that many earnest and persevering talkers make is to
suppose that to be engrossed is the same thing as being engrossing.
It is true of conversation as of many other things, that the half
is better than the whole. People who are fond of talking ought to
beware of being lengthy. How one knows the despair of conversing
with a man who is determined to make a clear and complete statement
of everything, and not to let his hearer off anything! Arguments,
questions, views, rise in the mind in the course of the harangue,
and are swept away by the moving stream. Such talkers suffer from a
complacent feeling that their information is correct and complete,
and that their deductions are necessarily sound. But it is quite
possible to form and hold a strong opinion, and yet to realize that