Do not let yourself be put out at this point by the fact that people with large unearned incomes are by no means always loafing or lolling. The energetic ones often overexert themselves, and have to take “rest cures” to recover. Those who try to make life one long holiday find that they need a holiday from that too. Idling is so unnatural and boresome that the world of the idle rich, as they are called, is a world of ceaseless activities of the most fatiguing kind. You may find on old bookshelves a forgotten nineteenth century book in which a Victorian lady of fashion defended herself against the charge of idleness by describing her daily routine of fashion both as hostess and visitor in London. I would cheerfully sweep a crossing rather than be condemned to it. In the country, sport is so elaborately organized that every month in the year has its special variety: the necessary fishes and birds and animals are so carefully bred and preserved for the purpose that there is always something to be killed. Risks and exposures and athletic feats of which the poor in towns know nothing are matters of course in the country house, where broken collar bones are hardly exceptional enough to be classed as accidents. If sports fail there are always games: ski-ing and tobogganing, polo, tennis, skating on artificial ice, and so forth, involving much more exhausting physical exercise than many poor women would care to face. A young lady, after a day of such exercise, will, between dinner and bedtime, dance a longer distance than the postman walks. In fact the only people who are disgustingly idle are the children of those who have just become rich, the new rich as they are called. As these unfortunate fortunates have had neither the athletic training nor the social discipline of the old rich, with whom what we call high life is a skilled art needing a stern apprenticeship, they do not know what to do with themselves; and their resourceless loafing and consumption of chocolate creams, cigarets, cocktails, and the sillier sort of novels and illustrated papers whilst they drift about in motor cars from one big hotel to another, is pitiable. But in the next generation they either relapse into poverty or go to school with the class they can now afford to belong to, and acquire its accomplishments, its discipline, and its manners.