the easy sociality of the family board has almost ceased, and the
average club has so expanded that it savours more of hotel freedom than
home cosiness.

"I am not a misanthrope or a woman hater, as you know, yet from what I
gather I fear that, in the upper middle class at least, it is the women
who are responsible for this increased formality that most men naturally
would avoid. Led by personal ambition, or that of young daughters, they
seek to maintain a standard just enough beyond their easy grasp to feel
ill at ease, if not humiliated, to be caught off guard. I remember once
when I was a mere boy hearing my father say in a sorrowing tone to my
eldest sister, who was giving fugitive reasons for not being able to
array herself quickly for some festivity for which the invitation had
been delayed, yet to which she longed to go: 'Wherever woman enters
socially, then complications begin that are wholly of her own making. I
warrant before Eve had finished her fig-leaf petticoat she was bothering
Adam to know if he thought there could be another woman anywhere who had
a garment of rarer leaves than her own.'

"The clubs do somewhat better, being under male management, but those
among them that ranked as so conservative that membership was the hall
mark of intellectual acquirements and stamped a man as either author,
artist, or amateur of letters and the fine arts, have had their doors
pushed open by many of those who wish to wear in public the name of
being without good right, and so the little groups of kindred spirits
have broken away, the authors in one direction, the followers of the
drama to habitations of their own, artists who are too independent to be
overborne by money in another, and thus the splitting spirit increases
until it vanishes in a maze of cliques and coteries. The names may stand
on the lists, the faces are absent, and one must wander through half a