And if futility clings very closely to the very gold that is the basis of our class and our estate, it clings, too, to almost everything else that we do. Come with me to a fashionable restaurant or the dining-room of a great hotel. At the dinner hour it is crowded with hundreds of people. One might think that they are hungry and that they come to eat. It is hardly so. They come to hear the orchestra, to talk with their friends, to play with food and drink of a kind and a quantity far beyond their needs. Dinner is but an excuse. The whole occasion is a diversion, nothing more. Contrast an occasion like that with the homely gathering of a few choice spirits out in a simple country home, or in the middle-class city home if you like, and note the marvellous difference. It has been my good fortune, on far too few occasions it is true, to be admitted as a friend into what I might call a middle-class home--the home of an author, not by any means rich. I will simply say, without going into details, that every time I went there it made me homesick, and I stopped it for that reason. I do not think I could say more if I wrote a book about it. Of all the melancholy travesties on fun, I think that the sports and games of the wealthy young men and women of our day are the finest parody ever written or acted. Drive through a country district to a fashionable out-of-town club. At half a dozen places on your way you will see groups of boys and girls playing ball, flying kites, paddling, rowing, or doing something else in the natural human way. You will hear shouts, quarrels perhaps, signs of intense and natural rivalry. When you come to your journey’s end you will find other groups of pleasure seekers. Go join the groups of young men and women in beautiful summer costumes playing golf or tennis; or sit on the piazzas over the sea and watch a game of bridge. Listen for the shouts of joy such as you heard down the road, and you will hear the cawing of the crows. Catch the drift of the conversation. In a very great number of cases the subject matter of it is that it would be a lot more fun to do something else at some other time in some other place. The dreary pleasures of the idle rich, yachting, horseracing, golf, tennis, hunting--these are not sports; they are schemes devised to keep us from being bored to death by the mere fact of living. I met a man down town the other day who told me he had bought a farm in Alberta. For a great many years past I have met him at all sorts of functions in all the big cities of the East, in London, and in Paris. I asked him what in the world he was going to do with a farm. At first he wouldn’t reply, afraid that he might hurt my feelings, but finally he told me.