"'My dear madam,' I told her, 'light is always light;' but I suppose you will acknowledge there is a difference between having our streets illuminated with oil-lamps hung on a rope, or brilliant with gas and electricity. Art and science and literature must progress with their age. Scott and Fielding and Smollett don't suit the nineteenth century, any more than perhaps Braddon, Ouida, and Rhoda Broughton may suit the twentieth. Nevertheless, each has had its day and held its champions, irrespective of what a coming generation will say on the subject. The immediate good, excitement, benefit, is all Society thinks of now. It has laid its demands on each respective cycle--birth, or heroism, or refined manners, or even mind. But in our age it worships the golden calf alone. _You_ don't know, and I don't; but all our reward is to be wondered at, and never to 'get on' with people. It is Lady Jean Salomans who 'gets on.' But then she knows her age and accepts it, and goes with it. I dare say, being a clever woman, she laughs in her sleeve at one set, and yawns after a prolonged dose of the other; but she's the most popular woman in London, and there's something in that more satisfactory nowadays than in saying: 'I am the Queen of England.' You and I will never be 'popular' in her sense, Lauraine, because we don't take the trouble, or perhaps appreciate, the reward. As for you, my dear, you are too transparent for Society. You show if you are bored or pleased, or happy or sad. That doesn't do. You should always go about masked, or you are sure to offend some one or other. You are young, and have been very much admired, and have a splendid position. Socially you might take the lead of Lady Jean, but you never will. You don't care enough about the 'honour and glory' of social success." "No; it seems to me unutterably wearisome." "Exactly, and you show that you feel it to be so. I have done the same for long, but then I covered my dereliction with the cloak of eccentricity. You simply do nothing but look like a martyr." "Why will people live and act as if this life was the be-all and end-all of existence, I wonder?" murmurs Lauraine. "Fancy fretting one's soul away in the petty worries of social distinction, the wretched little triumphs of Fashion. To me it seems such an awfully humiliating waste of time."