Improving Our Talking Life : Page 21

finds a stranger interesting, one is stimulated by him to continue the talk and the acquaintance, if he has a wide range of interests, if he has some particular enthusiasms, and if he seems to get underneath the surface of anything discussed. The latter is precisely the hardest to analyze. It seems to be the real secret. It is a sort of better grip on a subject than most have, a tendency to see it from more angles. It is most certainly the tendency to rise from the particular into the universal, to relate an instance to a law, a fact to a truth. A dull person will describe his aging father's ailments; an interesting one will go from his father's ailments to the problems of old people in general. That tendency seems to me the most definite single factor between tiresome talkers and stimulating ones.