rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house--to play bridge--with women!’ This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost insupportable--the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even, too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional outlet; what is it? Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at the stag-parties.