Edward E, Paramore, Jr., in a recent article entitled "A Little Handbook of Female Bores," being the first four chapters of the Bore's Bae-doker, or an easy guide to misery making. describes a lady where most of us have met in Shanghai, albeit he places her as plying twixt the Continent and the States. Hark to his advice as to how best to annoy your friends:
If you, my dear lady, are fortunate enough to have travelled about a little, and met some of the more recently discredited nobility, your career as a bore is assured in advance. The bore who has conscientiously made the rounds of the fashionable watering places in Europe, and whose social success revolved precariously around chance acquaintance with an impecunious earl and a shady duchess, can always be depended upon to bore people to the point of homicide. Therefore, if you can prevail upon the generosity of your husband, father, trust company or other source of loot, to let you spend a summer abroad, the social wret chadness you can manufacture—upon your return to the United States—is a good deal more than it cost. you to acquire. Efficiency, for the itinerant lady snob, is an easy matter, once she has mastered the text-books on the subject, the most essential of which ary Baedeker's Guides to France, Italy and England, Burke's Peerags, L'Almanack de Gotha, and the Cook's Tours folder covering the Mediterranean.
When you have memorized—the genealogical tables of the 12 leading families of Turope and invented at least two scandalous anecdotes about each (in which you play a small but benevolent' part) you are ready to practisd your profession. Your proficiency will be indicated by the number of people to whom you can tell tha same tale per day, how skilfully you can maneuver yourself into the lime-light, and how quickly you can force your victims to make excuses to get away from you. If they stop asking you to dinner, you are just beginning; if they cut you on the street, you are making real progress.
1 Your conversational technique, of course, is simple—a matter of a few set formule, For instance, take your story of how you came j to know that the young Marquis of Invernesshire was only after the iron-monger's daughter for her money, or how you tactfully retrained from telling Lady Wyndham Pique that you know how she met Sir Wyndham in the Alaska gold rush of 's9.
When introducing the story you must be sure to include enough
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.