I begin to feel dissatisfied with myself that I was not at the Thompsons’. Trying to get even with her, I ask her if she is going to the Browns’ next Monday. (There are no Browns, she will have to say, No.) She is not, and her tone suggests that a social stigma rests upon the Browns. I ask her if she has been to Barnum’s Circus; she hasn’t, but is going. I give her my impressions of Barnum’s Circus, which are precisely the impressions of everybody else who has seen the show. “Or if luck be against me, she is possibly a smart woman, that is to say, her conversation is a running fire of spiteful remarks at the expense of every one she knows, and of sneers at the expense of every one she doesn’t. I always feel I could make a better woman myself, out of a bottle of vinegar and a penn’orth of mixed pins. Yet it usually takes one about ten minutes to get away from her. “Even when, by chance, one meets a flesh-and-blood man or woman at such gatherings, it is not the time or place for real conversation; and as for the shadows, what person in their senses would exhaust a single brain cell upon such? I remember a discussion once concerning Tennyson, considered as a social item. The dullest and most densely-stupid bore I ever came across was telling how he had sat next to Tennyson at dinner. ‘I found him a most uninteresting man,’ so he confided to us; ‘he had nothing to say for himself—absolutely nothing.’ I should like to resuscitate Dr. Samuel Johnson for an evening, and throw him into one of these ‘At Homes’ of yours.” My friend is an admitted misanthrope, as I have explained; but one cannot dismiss him as altogether unjust. That there is a certain mystery about Society’s craving for Society must be admitted. I stood one evening trying to force my way into the supper room of a house in Berkeley Square. A lady, hot and weary, a few yards in front of me was struggling to the same goal. “Why,” remarked she to her companion, “why do we come to these places, and fight like a Bank Holiday crowd for eighteenpenny-worth of food?” “We come here,” replied the man, whom I judged to be a philosopher, “to say we’ve been here.” I met A— the other evening, and asked him to dine with me on Monday. I don’t know why I ask A— to dine with me, but about once a month I do. He is an uninteresting man. “I can’t,” he said, “I’ve got to go to the B—s’; confounded nuisance, it will be infernally dull.” “Why go?” I asked. “I really don’t know,” he replied. A little later B— met me, and asked me to dine with him on Monday. “I can’t,” I answered, “some friends are coming to us that evening. It’s a duty dinner, you know the sort of thing.” “I wish you could have managed it,” he said, “I shall have no one to talk to. The A—s are coming, and they bore me to death.” “Why do you ask him?” I suggested. “Upon my word, I really don’t know,” he replied.