But, if women stabilise, they also stratify. Men are more liquid entities, coalescing temporarily with other men at any level without difficulty and without feeling themselves engaged to remain at that or any other level longer than they please. But there is a viscosity about women—it is only another way of regarding their stabilising function—which forbids them to flow so freely and makes it harder for them to disengage themselves after any coalition with other entities of their own kind. So they arrange themselves inevitably in strata, the number of which in England is legion, which rise with an infinity of gradation from the labourer’s cottage to the royal palace. The process is almost too natural to be called snobbery, though its result often gives rise to that unpleasant quality, for the feminine element is buoyant and subject rather to the laws of expansion than those of gravity. Mrs John Lane’s Maria, good-natured but vulgarly pushing, will stick at nothing to penetrate the layers immediately above her: armed with determination, selfishness and ingratitude she marches brazenly to the attack, braving the snub to force the breach, feeling the wound but snatching the dart from it to add to the armoury which, from her ultimate vantage point, she will discharge upon her subsequent imitators. And a Maria will drag a man upwards with her, protesting but powerless, for men have not the force to abjure or to withstand such campaigns. Comic enough in fiction, it is nauseating in reality, especially as these pushing particles admit nothing but entirely laudable ambitions, whereas the scale in which they so furiously struggle to rise is not one of wit or merit, but one of trivialities, of pennies and titles, motor cars and meals.