In other words, they dramatise
continually. Now, one does not do this when one is old--it is a childish
game--and it is another proof that they are younger than we, who do not
enjoy our work, and indeed, most of us, are ashamed of it and want the
world to believe that we live like the lilies on private means.
Similarly, many Americans seem, when they talk, to be two persons: one
the talker, and the other the listener charmed by the quality of his
discourse. There is nothing detrimental in such duplicity. Indeed, I
think I have a very real envy of it. But one of the defects of the
listening habit is perhaps to make them too rhetorical, too verbose. It
is odd that the nation that has given us so much epigrammatic slang and
the telegraph and the telephone and the typewriter should have so little
of what might be called intellectual short-hand. But so it is. Too many
Americans are remorseless when they are making themselves clear.
Yet the passion for printed idiomatic sententiousness and arresting
trade-notices is visible all the time. You see it in the newspapers and
in the shops. I found a children's millinery shop in New York with this
laconic indication of its scope, in permanent letters, on the plate-
glass window: "Lids for Kids." A New York undertaker, I am told, has
affixed to all his hearses the too legible legend: "You may linger, but
I'll get you yet.
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