The artist is the director, the book a many-colored whirligig. Group after group revolves before us, while the artist smiles with an arch, faintly satiric smile, pointing out to us the weaknesses of the participants in this sacred social world, a delightfully gay throng, constantly occupied in singing, cajoling, feasting, playing, and dancing. Each of the characters in this book recognizes only one duty toward himself--not to be bored--and one law toward his neighbors--not to bore them. The wheel of the merry-go-round turns again; color is blurred with color; figure succeeds figure. Montez, Monsieur, montez, Madame. The show begins. HIGH SOCIETY Advice as to Social Campaigning, and Hints on the Management of Dowagers, Dinners, Debutantes, Dances, and the Thousand and One Diversions of Persons of Quality [Illustration] The Drawings by FISH The Prose Precepts by DOROTHY PARKER GEORGE S. CHAPPELL and FRANK CROWNINSHIELD G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS · NEW YORK and LONDON The Knickerbocker Press [Illustration] A HINT TO HIGHWAYMEN Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, by the VANITY FAIR PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. Copyright, 1920, by G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Fish, And Her Work When, in the summer of 1914, certain remarkable drawings of social life, by a new hand, began to appear, in _Vanity Fair_ in New York, and in _The Tatler_ in London, people all over the world stared at them, amazed, amused, admiring. Then they stared at each other, demanding, with one voice: “Who, under the sun, is Fish?” Meantime, a tall, slender young girl of twenty-two was drawing the pictures that were helping to keep laughter alive during those dark days--and troubling very little indeed as to whether Fame’s wandering searchlight would ever find her out. That girl was “Fish,” deemed to-day, by many critics, the most distinguished of satirical black-and-white illustrators. Miss Fish has created, on that miraculous drawing-board of hers, a complete human society, as original and amusing as the worlds of George Du Maurier and Charles Dana Gibson. It is a world populated by young-old matrons, astoundingly mature young girls, Victorian lady remnants, resplendent captains of industry, pussy-footing English butlers, amourous nursemaids, race touts, yearning young lovers, swanking soldiers, blank and vapid bores, bridge-playing parsons, and middle-class millionaires. But, for all its sophistication, it is a world of innocence. The creatures in it are of a touching simplicity, an incredible naïveté. Fish is one of the only caricaturists who has ever done this sort of satire without malice--who has ever treated the poor, misguided children of this world as if they were _really_ children.