Then there were some lady-novelists, attended at a respectful distance by their weary husbands, all alert to talk about their works; other writers who found everybody else overrated, and professed to despise popularity, or to regard it as a deadly microbe; critics who grumbled at being expected to criticise things they were unaccustomed to, and others who protested that life was too short for anything to be endured which they didn’t like; and ladies who, while industriously making notes of the costumes of the guests, talked largely of the claims of literature and the power of the Press. There were one or two A.R.A.’s run to seed, and two or three members of the Emancipated Art League, who held that it was a higher testimony to true artistic merit to be laughed at by the _Times_ than praised by Ruskin. There was a bountiful supply of “entertainers,” amateur and professional, all ready to sing, recite, ventriloquise, or perform card-tricks on the slightest provocation. There were a few civic dignitaries, doctors, lawyers, and divines with a penchant for the stage; some “Society Actresses” to give the affair style; an Irish member or two, more or less connected with newspapers, the usual sprinkling of men-about-town, who go “everywhere,” and women of fashion, as reflected by the ladies’ journals, together with an indistinguishable crowd of persons whose evening’s enjoyment appeared to consist of asking, “Who is that?” and flattering themselves that they were in the company of genius and greatness. And this was “everybody who is anybody,” while Mrs. Vere Veneer was the Madame Recamier of this latter-day _salon_ of small “somebodies.” To many of her acquaintances who delight to be her guests, Mrs. Veneer is merely a social mushroom. They did not observe her social growth till she was a full-fledged hostess, giving “At Homes,” to which they were ready to accept invitations. They know nothing of the patient struggle from obscurity; they saw not the persistent progress, step by step, towards the attainment of her ambition. To “get into Society” is, among the middle classes, the ruling passion in the average female breast, just as money-making is in the male. By getting into “Society” I do not mean necessarily being admitted into Court circles but the attainment of a more important social rating than the people next door, or being invested with a certain definite distinction that lifts one’s name above the crowd.