The most satisfactory reflection whereby to dispel the effect of this dismal picture is this: the thing carries its antidote with it to all but hopelessly narrow minds. The pleasures of dancing within an area of a yard square, and of listening night after night to the same insipid gallantries and insincere congratulations, cannot fail to pall after a time. A French author says that after the age of thirty, a woman of any account does not dance; she leaves this pleasure to those who have no other.(64) As with all pleasures which address the senses rather than the intellect, a surfeit often proves a cure. You have tasted all the delights to be got from certain things, and the sameness at last begins to pall. There could be no more effectual check on the levelling spirit of the age than a voluntary renunciation for a time on the part of the possessors of wealth and power, and a temporary enjoyment of these honors on the part of those who envy them. How soon should we see the harassed artisan fly from the post he once coveted, the working‐girl tear off the finery she envied, the millionaire _pro tem._ entreat his coachman to change places with him! Those who, in the midst of their grinding toil, envy the man in broadcloth, the woman in her barouche, whom they pass and repass day by day, quite leave out of the scales the weight of inner anxiety, grief, or often only _ennui_, which burdens the rich and fashionable. If they could tell how this one’s heart is devoured by jealousy, how that one’s home is rendered gloomy by his too plodding ambition, or unhappy by his wife’s irritable temper! If they could guess how that sickly, white child, seated among its furs in that dark, handsome clarence, causes sleepless nights and heavy fears to that anxious mother in velvet robe and seal‐skin cloak! If they only knew the secret remorse for ever gnawing at the heart of this exquisite of the clubs, whispering the name of a girl once happy and innocent—a name now to him the synonym of a crime; or if they could tell the thoughts of the substantial merchant, as he turns away with heavy steps from a counting‐house which, the more astounding is its financial success, the more it resembles, in all but in name, a gambling‐den! And, above all, did they but know how often the sad votary of fashion, in some moment of long‐repressed but untamable natural emotion, cries out for the freedom of the poor and their robust health! That is the saddest part of this grim masque—no one is contented, no one believes in himself or in his fellow‐man; it is a drama in which the actors know full well that when the foot‐lights are put out and the curtain of night falls, they will no longer be what they seem. So the gigantic sham grows day by day, stifling nature, burying the intellect, blurring the moral sense, fossilizing the whole being. Outward shapes of humanity remain, but, by some fell enchantment, the spiritual essence is sucked away, and an automaton,