While the excess of demand over supply set a premium on young bachelors, it forced down the value of those who entertained them and drove entertaining to a lasting discount. In 1910, a few of the Victorians still left cards at the houses where they had dined; by 1914, the custom was suspect as a weak admission of thankfulness; and, when the gracious days of the great small courtesies were voted obsolete, an uncaring telephone invitation from the lips of a butler was inevitably met by an acceptance or a refusal as careless of even formal obligation. The despised prim decorum of Victorian social intercourse was replaced by head-hunting on the one side and by moss-trooping on the other; and, as, in three years, there was more entertaining and less hospitality in London than in any other part of the world, so there was also less gratitude and more greed. The young girl with social gifts, and the young man without, were not only enabled but encouraged to live from Tuesday until Friday at the expense of those whom they would have disdained to call their friends; and the parasite had by no means exhausted the flow of hospitality when he bade farewell to his party in the early hours of Saturday morning. If he played golf, lawn-tennis and bridge, if he played any one of them, if--playing no games of any kind--he could satisfy his hostess that he would be content to slumber in the country for two nights and a day, he would receive more invitations than he could use. II In the engaging or tragic folly of the æsthetes, in the literary and artistic adventures of the nineties, in the blatancy and arrogance of the new imperialism, the death-knell of the Victorian age was sounded before the death of Queen Victoria. Between the end of the South African war and the outbreak of hostilities with Germany, there was time for the whole face of English social life to be changed. There was time, and there was a will. English society, so defiant of definition, had hitherto been founded on an aggregate of families deriving their influence from landed estates and made sensible of their obligations by their territorial position. The original nucleus was gradually increased by recruits from among those who made fortunes in commerce or rose to a commanding position in politics or the public services; but the new blood filtered in so sparingly that it was absorbed and transmuted by the old. The existing order was not threatened until the personality and power of those who clamoured without the gate exceeded the resistance of those who wilted within.