Though it caused my vitality to droop and drain, I fulfilled my part of the contract. I took a monstrosity in Bruton Street, gave four huge parties, attended dozens of other huge parties, was forced to carry on disjointed chat through _Tristan_ in a box, sit through _Rigoletto_ in a stall, and poison my system in Night Clubs; so learning to despise humanity--or rather that brand of it--as no man should be taught. Had I possessed a constitution which would have allowed me to drink my critical sense to drowsing point, I might have tolerated such a _régime_, but, unfortunately, my grandfather had mortgaged the family liver. As I withered Ethel bloomed. Her polluted sense of values and her intense social vanity made her revel in this frenetic round of snobbery, this eternal return of jostling, aimless futility. I was not a success. My temperament nipped me below the arm-pits and dragged me round, the skeleton at the feast, though I never caused any awed hush to fall upon the assembly. “Arthur, I do wish you’d make an effort to seem to enjoy things,” Ethel once said. “The other night I overheard George Willard say that you were the World’s Worst Flat-tyre at a party. It makes me feel so ashamed and embarrassed.” “Do you think I care what that chinless, brainless, Bateman-drawing thinks about me?” I replied, knowing I was a fool to argue. “Well, he’s the son of a Duke,” said Ethel; “and what do you mean by a ‘Bateman-drawing’?” “Oh, he was a pupil of Rembrandt,” I replied inanely. “You pretend to know all about Art, but the other day, when Lady Frowse was trying to discuss the Academy with you, you looked absolutely ‘gaga.’” “Lady Frowse,” I replied, “was quoting verbatim from the notice in the _Times_, which, unfortunately, I had already read.” Then Ascot, jostle, clothes, and equine interludes--then Cowes, jostle, different clothes and the occasional belching of a decrepit cannon. And then Ethel went off to twitter in butts, and I, thank God, to Paradown and peace.