Social life is one of the objects of living in New York; and social life
to ninety per cent of society people means nothing but eating one
another's dinners. Men never pay calls or go to teas. The dinner, which
has come to mean a heavy, elaborate meal, eaten amid noise, laughter and
chatter, at great expense, is the expression of our highest social
aspirations. Thus it would seem, though I had not thought of it before,
that I work seven or eight hours every day in order to make myself
rather miserable for the rest of the time.

"I am going to lie down and rest this afternoon," my wife will sometimes
say. "We're dining with the Robinsons."

Extraordinary that pleasure should be so exhausting as to require rest
in anticipation! Dining with these particular and other in-general
Robinsons has actually become a physical feat of endurance--a _tour de
force_, like climbing the Matterhorn or eating thirteen pounds of
beefsteak at a sitting. Is it a reminiscence of those dim centuries when
our ancestors in the forests of the Elbe sat under the moss-hung oaks
and stuffed themselves with roast ox washed down with huge skins of
wine? Or is it a custom born of those later days when, round the blazing
logs of Canadian campfires, our Indian allies gorged themselves into
insensibility to the sound of the tom-tom and the chant of the
medicine-man--the latter quite as indispensable now as then?

If I should be called on to explain for what reason I am accustomed to
eat not wisely but too well on these joyous occasions, I should be
somewhat at a loss for any adequate reply. Perhaps the simplest answer
would be that I have just imbibed a cocktail and created an artificial
appetite. It is also probable that, in my efforts to appear happy and at