You must know that the rich, both the fashionables and the excludeds, are intimately associated in business. Now, in the days before the Amsterdam Club, if a rich fashionable wished to talk business out of office hours with a rich unfashionable, he had to take him to his home or to his club, one or the other. You will readily appreciate that either course involved disagreeable complications. The rich unfashionable would say: “Why am I not invited to this snob’s house _socially_? Why does not this hound see that I am elected to his elegant club? I’ll teach this wrinkle-snout how to spit at me. I’ll slip a stiletto into his back, damn him.” As the number of rich unfashionables increased, as the number of stealthy financial stilettoings for social insult grew and swelled, the demand for a “way out” became more clamorous and panicky. The final result was the Amsterdam Club--perhaps by inspiration, perhaps by accident. And so it has come to pass that now, when a rich fashionable wishes to talk finance with a rich pariah, he does not have to run the risk of defiling his home or his exclusive club. With the gracious cordiality wherefor aristocracy is famed in song and story, he says: “Let us go to _our_ club”--for, the rich fashionables see to it that every rich pariah is elected to the Amsterdam immediately he becomes a person of financial consequence. And I fancy that not one in ten of the rich pariah members dreams how he is being insulted and tricked. All, or nearly all, imagine they are elected by favor of the great fashionable plutocrats to about the most exclusive club in New York. Also, not one in a dozen of the fashionable members appreciates how he is degrading himself--for, to my quaint mind, the snob degrades only himself.