sunset should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught
myself nodding to it--a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance.
Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I told
myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who had been
frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the
gaping, glassless windows through which they had been wont to watch
the human comedy. There they had stood, puffing their smoke and
cracking their jests, and tearing women's reputations to shreds.

Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman's reputation torn to
shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have
always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come
my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined
to regard it as a figment. Such conversation as I have heard in clubs
has been always of a very mild, perfunctory kind. A social club (even
though it be a club with a definite social character) is a collection
of heterogeneous creatures, and its aim is perfect harmony and good-
fellowship. Thus any definite expression of opinion by any member is
regarded as dangerous. The ideal clubman is he who looks genial and
says nothing at all. Most Englishmen find little difficulty in
conforming with this ideal. They belong to a silent race. Social clubs
flourish, therefore, in England. Intelligent foreigners, seeing them,
recognise their charm, and envy us them, and try to reproduce them at
home. But the Continent is too loquacious. On it social clubs quickly
degenerate into bear-gardens, and the basic ideal of good-fellowship
goes by the board. In Paris, Petersburg, Vienna, the only social clubs
that prosper are those which are devoted to games of chance--those
which induce silence by artificial means. Were I a foreign visitor,
taking cursory glances, I should doubtless be delighted with the clubs
of London. Had I the honour to be an Englishman, I should doubtless