Americans do not give cooking, "considered as one of the fine arts", an important place in

life. Lunch is for them a kind of gratuity paid to the body. They hurriedly toss it a fruit or a fish and go back to work. Certain writers, in rebellion, have founded the club, "Three Hours for Lunch", but they are an agreeable exception. Even at dinner, general conversation is rare. Everyone talks to his neighbor. After dinner the men linger at the table, a custom inherited from England. In New York your host will often propose taking you to the theatre, or else he will provide a pianist, a singer, a lecturer. The idea of leaving the guests to themselves, and expecting them to get pleasure out of meeting one another, astonishes and even appalls him. His excessive modesty does not permit his imagining that his friends can be happy merely in being in his house, with one another. He treats them like children. On Christmas Eve you will see, in some of the pleasant homes in New York, Christmas trees for grown people. In other places, after a dinner at which you exchange ideas, there will be a magician who will do his best to amuse the oldsters. There you must realize that the absence of conversation in American homes comes, not from absence of ideas or lack of intelligence of understanding, but from an unconquerable shyness and a prodigious self-distrust.

The Americans hurry through lunch because ______.

A．they are ambitious

B．they have rebelled against English customs

C．they don' t think it is important

D．talking while eating is impolite