That there is much in the social spectacle which falls only to the eye of one half-retired is certain. The vagaries of “society,” in the conventional sense of the term, are one of the traditional matters of laughter; our comic journals have enlightened even dull minds on this point. It is pleasant to a humorous contemplation to note the high pretensions of the “fine world”; how naïvely, for instance, it assumes that it holds all the men of brains and all the good talkers in its service;[280] pleasant, that is {332} to say, to one who bears in mind some of the characteristics of this world, such as a certain emptiness in the matter of ideas, together with something of the readiness of a certain kind of dog to follow any self-appointed leader, and an amiable impartiality in crowning any sort of “hero” that happens to be trumpeted, whether potentate from the East or showman from the West. It is entertaining, too, to note how enclosed it remains within its purely arbitrary standards, being rather shocked, for example, to find when it travels that there can be such a thing as “society” in Italy which is not a “dining society”. This, and much more, will often draw the eye of humour, oddly enough, in the same direction as that of an awe-struck flunkeyism. It is an agreeable pastime, too, for our half-retired observer to watch the fierce struggles of men and women in these days to gain a footing within the charmed circle. Here, surely, the gyrations of the moral figure reach the height of absurdity. Nowhere does there seem to reflection to be quite such a disproportion between effort and its doubtful reward as in these labours of the hot and panting to win a footing on the fashionable terrain. What makes the scene the more pathetically droll is that success never seems to satisfy; the necessity of getting in is followed by a no less dire necessity of keeping oneself visible in the tightly-packed crowd. The sensitiveness of men of high position to the least sign of neglect in their goddess is something that cannot fail to tickle a humorous fancy. It is said that high officials once passed unhappy days and nights waiting for an invitation to dinner. The occasion was a national festival, when some inventive dames, taking themselves apparently quite seriously as representative women of the age, proceeded each to invite a representative male. So do the gods give {333} us harvest of laughter by sowing vanity with its small spitefulnesses in the minds of men, and setting “society” to lure them to her thraldom.