such persons, for the rooms would be so crowded that he would see the hopelessness of attempting to edge or wedge his way through the throng without tearing off his wings.  An angel, in short, would stand no chance in one of these brilliant assemblies on account of his wings, and he probably could not be heard, on account of the low, heavenly pitch of his voice.  His inference would be that these people had been selected to come together by reason of their superior power of screaming.  He would be wrong.

—­They are selected on account of their intelligence, agreeableness, and power of entertaining each other.  They come together, not for exercise, but pleasure, and the more they crowd and jam and struggle, and the louder they scream, the greater the pleasure.  It is a kind of contest, full of good-humor and excitement.  The one that has the shrillest voice and can scream the loudest is most successful.  It would seem at first that they are under a singular hallucination, imagining that the more noise there is in the room the better each one can be heard, and so each one continues to raise his or her voice in order to drown the other voices.  The secret of the game is to pitch the voice one or two octaves above the ordinary tone.  Some throats cannot stand this strain long; they become rasped and sore, and the voices break; but this adds to the excitement and enjoyment of those who can scream with less inconvenience.  The angel would notice that if at any time silence was called, in order that an announcement of music could be made, in the awful hush that followed people spoke to each other in their natural voices, and everybody could be heard without effort.  But this was not the object of the Reception, and in a moment more the screaming would begin again, the voices growing higher and higher, until, if the roof were taken off, one vast shriek would go up to heaven.

This is not only a fashion, it is an art.  People have to train for it, and as it is a unique amusement, it is worth some trouble to be able to succeed in it.  Men, by reason of their stolidity and deeper voices, can never be proficients in it; and they do not have so much practice—­unless they are stock-brokers.  Ladies keep themselves in training in their ordinary calls.  If three or four meet in a drawing-room they all begin to scream, not that they may be heard—­for the higher they go the less they understand each other—­but simply to acquire the art of screaming at receptions.  If half a dozen ladies meeting by chance in a parlor should converse quietly in their sweet, ordinary home tones, it might be in a certain sense agreeable, but it would not be fashionable, and it would not strike the prevailing note of our civilization.  If it were true that a group of women all like to talk at the same time when they meet (which is a slander invented by men, who may be just as loquacious, but not so limber-tongued and quick-witted), and raise their voices to a shriek in order to dominate each other, it could be demonstrated that they would be more readily heard if they all spoke in low tones.  But the object is not conversation; it is the social exhilaration that comes from the wild exercise of the voice in working off a nervous energy; it is so seldom that in her own house a lady gets a chance to scream.