In a small house entertaining one’s friends is too often a most arduous and tiresome business, because we will one and all of us attempt to do a great deal too much, and appear to be able to afford all kinds of luxuries that we cannot possibly manage, and I strongly advise any young bride with small means and a smaller _ménage_ to confine herself entirely to afternoon teas, which require no waiting and cost extremely little, and to refuse on her part to go out to large dinners, which she cannot return, and for which she can neither afford the necessary dress, gloves, flowers, nor cabs, asking her friends to invite her to simpler entertainments boldly, and giving her reasons, which, of course, will be received kindly and in good faith by her friends. I am convinced that this absurd striving after society is at the bottom of the falseness of most of our English entertainments, and I trust some day to see ‘parties’ on a much broader and more satisfactory basis than they are at present, and I therefore beg all young householders to pause before they begin the same old round of costly gaiety, and to consider if they at least cannot bring about a better state of things. I have often in different houses seen with amazement how invitations are issued, and wondered if I am the only person who is thus taken behind the scenes and shown how hollow such invitations often are. Surely I must be, or else the great crushes I read of would never come off, and the dinners I hear about would lack guests, for I have rarely heard invitations talked over without listening to some such conversation as this: ‘Ask the Joneses, Gertrude.’ ‘Oh no, mother! she _is_ such a dowdy, and their last garden party was maddening.’ ‘I can’t help it, my dear. I went to their party, and we must pay them back. And then there are the Brownes; don’t forget the _e_--ridiculous creatures! It’s astonishing how some people creep up and others go down.’ ‘And he is dreadful, mother;’ and, in fact, I could go on for pages, while other pages could be occupied with descriptions of how the invitation is received at the Joneses’ and the Brownes’, who all go expecting to be bored or starved, and who return home to comment spitefully on an entertainment which, if successful, carries in their minds the donors half-way to the Bankruptcy Court, and, if a failure, is the cause of a good deal of violent abuse and unkind sneers levelled at their hosts. And then the conversation at these entertainments: ‘Have you seen the So-and-so’s lately?’ ‘Oh no; they never go anywhere now. Didn’t you hear about her and So-and-so?’ But really, when it comes to the talk I overhear at balls, dinners, at-homes, or in the Park, I lose my temper, and so will turn at once to other matters altogether.