Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in still ness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than of the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desperate attempt to pre vent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worth less person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine per cent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure. The object of conversation is not, for the most part to communicate ideas: it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz: there is even a buzz that is as exasperating as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner-party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable even to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbours. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears. They have nothing to tell them except that they have seen two or three new plays or that they had bad food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they just plume on themselves their success as conversationists. I have heard a young man holding up the monologue of a prince among modern wits for half an hour in order to tell us absolutely nothing about himself with opulent long-windedness. None of us except the young man himself liked it, but he looked as happy as if he had a crown on his head. According to the author, conversation is by and large a grim effort to ______.