If at the first calling of the half-forgotten roll they were unable to answer to their names, others stepped quickly forward to take their place. In breaking down social barriers, the war continued and went some distance towards completing a process which had been going on for twenty years. It has already been suggested that, in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign, "society" was a word with at least a fairly definite negative connotation: certain acts or qualities expelled a man from it; certain other qualities were needed to admit him to an intimate and interrelated community of a few hundred men and women who drew their prestige from land, basked in the sunshine of the court, supplied drafts for the diplomatic service, the foreign office, the brigade of guards, the household cavalry and a chosen few other units and felt neither need nor desire to know any one outside their own world. The first American invasion abolished the pedigree test; later, the monied-cosmopolitan invasion abolished every other. The close corporation was disbanded; and, though a few hostesses received only their old friends--without their old friends' new friends,--the others scattered in search of distraction; and even before the outbreak of war the two essentials in almost every gathering were that wealth should secure the generous minimum of comfort and that brains or eccentricity should provide the amusement. If in 1890 social success could be roughly appraised by the number of people that a man did not know, in 1920 it was measured by his industry and skill in getting to know everybody: aristocratic London and artistic London, diplomatic London and political London, financial London and theatrical London have all overflowed their old boundaries and now meet in the undefined vast pool of London. To dwellers in other capitals that is London's distinguishing mark; to many it is, within limits, London's greatest charm: the city is big enough to find room for every one, and each may lead his own life among his own friends. The _rastaquouère_ is not penned within his own fold, as in Paris, nor the actress in hers, as in New York; soldier and civilian meet on an equality that would amaze Berlin; Jew and gentile, pre-Conquest family and new rich in a way which Vienna would not tolerate. Diplomats in London have no corporate life of their own; ambassadors and _attachés_ scatter and lose themselves in a more numerous community; lawyers, merchants, politicians and newspaper-proprietors are everywhere. Above the super-tax limit London is wholly democratic: those few houses which struggled to exclude all but their owners' friends are one by one being sold or closed; a grave scandal is required to bar the road to court; a title is still to be had without any "damned nonsense of merit."