which regards its possessions as a trinket or plaything, and, amid an atmosphere of frivolity, is engaged in squandering its brief existence through every variety of passionless pleasure. It is enough for him, in analysing the ordinary undistinguished accumulation of great wealth, to note the balance of social service on the one hand, of remuneration on the other; and to wonder how long the obscure multitudes who labour with so scanty a return, in order that these may enjoy, will continue to be satisfied with what (to them) appears so improvident a bargain. And if this detached observer, inspired neither by hate nor envy, were asked to summarise the social advantage of all this heaped-up wealth expended by the few who have attained, he would be compelled to find it in a social convenience and amenity; in the provision of opportunity, embedded in pleasant surroundings and with bodily discomforts as far as possible removed, for entertaining conversation. So, concentrating themselves especially in London, for an annual campaign of association, there gather every year the companies of the successful. They have expended some half their days in tranquillity and quiet places--in rural England, in high Swiss mountain valleys--anywhere in which the too exasperated material of the human mind can be nursed back into some semblance of sanity. They gather, from the four winds, into the tumult of the capital, to occupy the remaining half of the year in deliberate tearing the fabric of that mind to pieces in an orgy of human intercourse. It is effort directed at the highest pressure, with no interspaces of silence in which to learn, to suffer, or to enjoy. It is the effort of those few who have attained success in a race where the majority are content with existence and endurance, to exhibit the magnitude of that success in a transitory experience of too violently accelerated life. For these months nobody is ever alone; nobody ever pauses to think; no one ever attempts to understand. All quick and novel sensations are pressed into the service of an ever more insistent demand for new things. Parliament pays its tribute, in a labyrinth of dining-rooms and a famous terrace, which is an annexe--as the Empire is an annexe--to the activities of this restless energy. What passes for British Art in a Royal Academy and other exhibitions; the Opera, dragging European singers to stimulate an audience numbed by the whirl of circumstance; any unexpected appeal, a decadent French play, actors from an earlier, simpler, passionate South, an audacious novel or two, a passing scandal, serve to infuse the concoction with some lambent vitality. But, for the most part, it is talk--talk--talk; talk at luncheon and tea and dinner; talk at huge, undignified crowded receptions, where each talker is disturbed by the consciousness that his neighbour is desirous of talking to others; talk at dances and at gatherings, far into the night; with the morning devoted to preparation for