he Mid-Victorian and the Early Edwardian
point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the page of
Curtis there is

'The tender grace of a day that is dead'

and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of
Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are
enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the
distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed,
well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers'
offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances
of fashion. 'The girls and women are of a higher average of beauty than
any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are generally well
built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,' Mr.
Pulitzer assures us."

"Well, oughtn't that to console?" we defied our other self. "Come! It's
a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when the
waiters are so often disappointed 'remittance men' of good English
family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn't ask
everything."

"No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in Curtis's
less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke and booze
throughout the night with the host in his 'library,' but the dancing
youth don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's supper, and
people don't throw things from their plates under the table."

"Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change for the better in
our best society, that there is no hope for it?"

"Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best
society be as it now imagines itself. I don't suppose that in all that
gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people
there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or
spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant
toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much
outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for
custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society."

"Very well, then," we said, with considerable resolution, "we must change
the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four hundred made up
of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, scientists,
musicians, actors, and ministers, with their wives, daughters, and
sisters, who will walk to one another's dinners,