The influence and example of American millionaires is a frequent theme of satire. In 1904 _Punch_ had attacked their acquisitiveness in a burlesque account of the contemplated "bodily removal of certain European landscapes." In 1905 he dealt faithfully with a famous "freak" dinner at the Savoy Hotel, costing £600 a head, when the guests were entertained in a huge gondola and the courtyard was flooded to represent a Venetian lagoon. The American "enfant terrible" in 1907, frankly discussing her relations with her parents, supplies an interesting comment on the complexities of divorce, as described a few years earlier by the late Mr. Henry James in _What Maisie Knew_. The unemployment and inefficiency of the Upper Classes were admirably satirized in a set of Neo-Chaucerian verses, suggested by a society chronicler who had anticipated a March of the Upper Class unemployed to the East End. In 1906 the Pageant craze assumed formidable dimensions, and the ubiquitous activities of Mr. Louis Napoleon Parker as Pageant-master are duly if disrespectfully acknowledged. _Punch_ had never been enthusiastic about "dressing up"; it was, in his view, foreign to the temper of the British and essentially one of the things which they managed better abroad. Moreover, he regarded this preoccupation with the past as an evasion of our responsibilities to the future. This view is pointedly expressed in the cartoon "Living on Reputation" in 1908, where Britannia (among the Pageants) remarks: "Quite right of them to show pride in my past; but what worries me is that nobody seems to take any interest in my future." "Smart" people were furiously interested in the things of the present, and for the most part in the things that did not matter. From 1906 right up to the war no feature of the feverish pleasure-hunt indulged in by the idle rich escaped the vigilant eye of "Blanche," whose "Letters," when all allowance is made for a spice of exaggeration and for the wit which the author perhaps too generously ascribes to her puppets, remain a substantially faithful picture of the audacious frivolity, the inanity, the rowdiness and the extravagance of England _de luxe_, unashamed of its folly, yet, at its worst, never inhuman or even arrogant. I don't think that any of "Blanche's" set would have quitted a shooting party because he was asked to drink champagne out of a claret glass, as in the picture of the young super-snob in 1908. [Sidenote: _Paint and "Pekies"_] [Illustration: THE CULT OF THE PEKY-PEKY FIRST OWNER OF PRIZE DOGLET: "These seaside places don't appeal to me the least little bit. But Ozoneville was recommended to give tone to Choo-choo's nerves. He's been suffering from severe shock through seeing two fearful mongrels have a fight in the park one day. Your little thingy-thing's off colour too?"