but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and
women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately
gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity
between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure
and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I
recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own
proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure
his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself
to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day.
It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by
every possible form of human irrelevancy--men and women well enough in
their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to
him and all he stood for--heroically doing his best to seem really "at
home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly
"dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see
how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague.
His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on
Fridays you found there--only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he
would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply,
by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!"

To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or
woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is
constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are
realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society
of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us
or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be
uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he
or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and
actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any