(_b_) xxx,000 a year and money accumulating. At first the enjoyment of the pleasures which money can give. The money continued to accumulate. Dawning realisation that it did not mean happiness, that it did not mean even health, and that affection and gratitude cannot be bought. The money still accumulating. All wants, rational and irrational, satisfied: the starting of peculiar fads, capricious gifts, fantastic charities. The money still accumulating. Ennui, disillusionment, gradual exhaustion and depression. Recourse had to some novel form of excitement; refuge taken in stimulants. The money still accumulating, but slowly choking. Despair, complete demoralisation, and at last welcome death. The money still accumulating, to drag down some heir and claim another victim. Let us see how the two sorts of crowds have impressed two writers. “What struck every observant delegate was the utter blankness of the faces that looked up at us from the pavement or down on us from the windows, with scarcely enough capacity for human interest to wonder who we were and what we wanted. Never a sign of humour. Stooped shoulders, hollow chests, ash-coloured faces, lightless eyes, and, ghastliest of all, mouths with bloodless gums and only here and there a useful tooth. Literally hundreds of women between seventeen and seventy crowded close to our motor-cars that day, and the marks were on them all.”[30] And: “Yours is the three hundredth carriage in this row that blocks the road for half a mile. In the two hundred and ninety-nine that came before the four hundred that come after you are sitting, too, with your face before you unseeing eyes. Resented while you gathered being; brought into the world with the most distinguished skill; remembered by your mother when the whim came to her; taught to believe that life consists in caring for your clean, well-nourished body and your manner that nothing usual can disturb; taught to regard Society as the little ring of men and women that you see, and to feel your business is to know the next thing that you want and get it given you; you have never had a chance. Sitting there in your seven hundred carriages you are blind--in heart and soul and voice and walk--the blindest creatures in the world ... and you are charming to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label ‘Blind.’ The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat later still; your tricks of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life, you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of Nature! So since you were born; so until you die!”[31]