“I’m sick. There isn’t much the matter with me, but I have simply got to have a change. My nerves have gone all to pieces. Playing bridge gives me the “willies.” I’d sooner pick rags than go to another dance. Golf--the way we play it in the summer--is worse than ping-pong. Late suppers have got on my nerves. The races are a horrible bore. I’d sooner go to Hoboken than Paris. I’ve got to do something or I will die. Last winter in London I made friends with a young fellow twenty-one years old who last month got into disgrace and was banished to Alberta. Last month I heard from him--and that settled me. He swears he has found the antidote. I’m going out to try it.” He went. I don’t suppose he’ll stay there, because he never stayed in any place in his life for any length of time, and I presume before long he’ll come back and spend a lot of money on manicures and make his hands look as if he had never worked before he plunges again into the same Dead Sea: but, sometimes, I wish I had the nerve to follow him, or to buy his farm from him when he grows tired of it. If our wealth, and our pleasures, turn at last to nothing and weary us beyond expression, no less in the more sacred things of life--real life, I mean--does this same miserable demon of futility pursue us. As the world has read these past two or three years the low, horrible, depraved story of the marital relationships of scion after scion of one of our wealthiest families, the world has turned with disgust from the paltry record of intrigue, vile lust, dishonour, and shame. That story is but one of many. It is true that in this, the dearest and tenderest of all the relationships of life, we are haunted by futility. Our young men and maidens marry in honour and hope in a world of hope, lighted by the eternal fires of love. Too often, alas! romance becomes tragedy, or comedy, if you look at it that way. It is the same old story. Everything is far too easy. All the comforts, all the luxuries, all the pleasures for which normal men and women have to work, drop, like over-ripe fruit, into their waiting hands. There is no struggle to hold their minds together. There is no common ambition to fill their hearts and souls with a desire for mutual help. It is all empty, frivolous, and vain. In time it is easy to slip away from the paths of convention into habits of looseness and even of vice. The old-fashioned religion is dead among us, and so one great protector of the home has passed and gone. I cannot find it in my heart to condemn as strongly as I should the lapses of the idle rich from the paths of virtue; for I know exactly how it is. It is futile. It is empty. It is a restriction of freedom. It is a chain about your neck. You try, at first, to loosen it; at last you determine to break it. Then the patient world is treated to another tale of infidelity, of misery, of little picayune human weakness--a tale to laugh at, or to weep over, according as you will.