_‘If,’ Sylvia went on with her denunciation, ‘you had once in our lives said to me: “You whore! You bitch! You killed my mother. May you rot in hell for it” ... you might have done something to bring us together.’_ _Tietjens said:_ _‘That’s, of course, true.’_ And my subject is--what else with such a text?--Sophistication. Not sophistication in the original unencrusted meaning of the word, but in the overlaid current understanding of it--an emotional rather than an intellectual condition. It is a condition very hard to define, since it is emotional, yet sufficiently easy to recognize--and admire. To be sophisticated you must be _blasé_; you must be witty; you must not take anything, especially vice, very hard; you must be gay and casual about problems that unsophisticated people are earnest about, though you may (here you are reaching rarefied heights of sophistication) be as earnest as you like about things that average people consider trivial. You must show familiarity with the world of High Society, but also amused disdain for it; you must know, and prove that you know, everything about ordering a dinner in such places as Ciro’s (Monte Carlo), the Ritz (Paris), and the Café de Paris (Biarritz). You should also be able to let fall--now and then, very carelessly, merely because you cannot at the moment think of the English word--a French or an Italian or even a German word or phrase; but it is not excessively important that you should do this correctly or even appropriately; the effect will be the same anyway. Among contemporary writers Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank are sophisticated; and so is Michael Arlen, and so is Ford Madox Ford (_né_ Hueffer). There is one small drawback to sophistication: it is impossible without an audience. One cannot pleasurably, perhaps not possibly, be sophisticated all alone by oneself. One cannot think of a man getting into an unshared bed as sophisticated--I mean to say, of course, after his valet has left him. Fiction is full of people marooned on desert islands; but only one writer, M. Jean Giraudoux, has ever thought of thus marooning a sophisticated character. It was a delicious and fantastic idea, which made _Suzanne et le Pacifique_ an irresistibly funny book.