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prove that, in an average gathering, the proportion of clever conversationalists to dull though voluble talkers is one to three hundred and twenty-four thousand. And yet almost every play contains at least three in a cast of ten whose repartee is unquestionably intended to be classed as "entertaining."

Even the "old-home" talk of our rural dramas, the line, "Land sakes, ain't them pies done yet?" with which the first act opens, has become, in spite of its affectation of naturalness, so theatrical that whenever we hear a genuine housewife say it in a real kitchen we suspect her of trying to talk like an actress.

Into this babel of artificial dialogue came Miss Lulu Bett bearing the revolutionary banner of banality. And under this banner march ninety-nine one-hundredths of American conversationalists. First in her book, and then in her play, Zona Gale discarded the ideal held by writers since Plutarch that their characters must say something unusual, and gave us "Dwight Herbert Deacon" to say the gorgeously conventional thing with epoch-making dullness.

"The baked potato contains more nourishment than potatoes prepared any other way. Roasting retains it," he asserts in the first act.

To which his wife replies: "That's what I always think."

And the white light of truth which bursts forth from this conversational sally discovers Oscar Wilde to be a shining collection of tinsel.

Zona Gale is the first author, to my knowledge, who