No true and invigorating social intercourse can take place among people who are cut off from real social activities, whose medium of contact is the utterly irrelevant and arbitrary performance of what they so exquisitely miscall "social functions." The foundation error lies in the confinement of a social being to a purely domestic scale of living. By bringing into the home people who have no real business there, they are instantly forced into an artificial position. The home is no place for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot play there, so they must be "entertained." So starts the merry-go-round. The woman must have social contact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business of life, so she tries to drag it in where she is; forcing the social life into the domestic. The domestic life is crowded out by this foreign current, and, as there is no place for legitimate social activities, in any home or series of homes, however large and costly, the illegitimate social activities are at once set up. The train of evils to the health of society we are all acquainted with, though not with their causes. Sociology is yet too new to us for practical application. We are too unfamiliar with normal social processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it would seem easy to understand. The human being's best growth requires a happy, quiet, comfortable home; with peace and health, order and beauty in its essential relations. The human being also requires right social relation, the work he is best suited to, full range of expression in that work, and intercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women are human beings. They are allowed the first class of relations--the domestic; but denied the other--the social. Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in an abnormal way, with inevitable evil results. We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness. The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together, arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met.