Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact
characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a
plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to
dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given
a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he
is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him
a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a
hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the
swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked.
Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him
for any place in good society short of Abraham's bosom; but even if he
were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be
possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to
their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the
house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.

We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom
Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happened
then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I
saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have
been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening
with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really
gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant
conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-a-vis of me, who
had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintance
with. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went
away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that I
did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a
note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went,
I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I