what was said, then the order might be given for the talk to go on in that tone, and that every person who raised the voice and began to scream should be gagged and removed to another room.  In this room could be collected all the screamers to enjoy their own powers.  The same experiment might be tried at a dinner-party, namely, to ascertain if the total hum of low voices in the natural key would not be less for the individual voice to overcome than the total scream of all the voices raised to a shriek.  If scientific research demonstrated the feasibility of speaking in an ordinary voice at receptions, dinner-parties, and in “calls,” then the Drawer is of opinion that intelligible and enjoyable conversation would be possible on these occasions, if it becomes fashionable not to scream.

DOES REFINEMENT KILL INDIVIDUALITY?

Is it true that cultivation, what we call refinement, kills individuality?  Or, worse than that even, that one loses his taste by over-cultivation?  Those persons are uninteresting, certainly, who have gone so far in culture that they accept conventional standards supposed to be correct, to which they refer everything, and by which they measure everybody.  Taste usually implies a sort of selection; the cultivated taste of which we speak is merely a comparison, no longer an individual preference or appreciation, but only a reference to the conventional and accepted standard.  When a man or woman has reached this stage of propriety we are never curious any more concerning their opinions on any subject.  We know that the opinions expressed will not be theirs, evolved out of their own feeling, but that they will be the cut-and-dried results of conventionality.

It is doubtless a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for surprise and little for emotion.  O ye belles of Newport and of Bar Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and agreeable, are you wasting your sweet lives by rule?  Is your compact, graceful, orderly society liable to be monotonous in its gay repetition of the same thing week after week?  Is there nothing outside of that envied circle which you make so brilliant?  Is the Atlantic shore the only coast where beauty may lounge and spread its net of enchantment?  The Atlantic shore and Europe?  Perhaps on the Pacific you might come back to your original selves, and find again that freedom and that charm of individuality that are so attractive.  Some sparkling summer morning, if you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara, inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of Montecito, among the