A spirited discussion springs up between a young girl who insists that women have outgrown the jumping-on-a-chair-at-the-sight-of-a-mouse era and a colonel who says that they haven’t.

“A woman’s unfailing reaction in any crisis,” the colonel says, “is to scream. And while a man may feel like it, he has that ounce more of nerve control than a woman has. And that last ounce is what counts.”

There has always been a debate on man versus woman under a crisis. In "The Dinner Party" we can draw our own conclusions as to who shows greater control.

"The Dinner Party" by Mona Gardner was first published in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1941.