stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are helped in their turn. In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we pay--for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring--for something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions--or for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society, yet die as they have lived--social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it, seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and show them that--thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder test, as they may be--they are by no means to be trusted with the amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that, how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality, they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in society--and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither meat nor garnish.