. That was why they
were building palaces, and flinging largesses of banquets and balls,
and tearing about the country in automobiles, and travelling over the
earth in steam yachts and private trains.

And first and last, the lesson of their efforts was, that the chase
was futile; the jaded nerves would not thrill. The most conspicuous
fact about Society was its unutterable and agonizing boredom; of its
great solemn functions the shop-girl would read with greedy envy, but
the women who attended them would be half asleep behind their jewelled
fans. It was typified to Montague by Mrs. Billy Alden's yachting party
on the Nile; yawning in the face of the Sphinx, and playing bridge
beneath the shadow of the pyramids--and counting the crocodiles and
proposing to jump in by way of "changing the pain"!

People attended these ceaseless rounds of entertainments, simply
because they dreaded to be left alone. They wandered from place to
place, following like a herd of sheep whatever leader would inaugurate
a new diversion. One could have filled a volume with the list of their
"fads." There were new ones every week--if Society did not invent them,
the yellow journals invented them. There was a woman who had her teeth
filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras. One
heard of monkey dinners and pyjama dinners at Newport, of horseback
dinners and vegetable dances in New York. One heard of fashion-albums
and autograph-fans and talking crows and rare orchids and reindeer
meat; of bracelets for men and ankle rings for women; of "vanity-boxes"
at ten and twenty thousand dollars each; of weird and repulsive pets,
chameleons and lizards and king-snakes--there was one young woman who
wore a cat-snake as a necklace. One would take to slumming and another
to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover made of
woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed flannel at sixteen
dollars a yard; one had inaugurated ice-skating in August, and another
had started a class for the study of Plato. Some were giving tennis
tournaments in bathing-suits, and playing leap-frog after dinner;
others had got dispensations from the Pope, so that they might have
private chapels and confessors; and yet others were giving "progressive
dinners," moving from one restaurant to another--a cocktail and
blue-points at Sherry's, a soup and Madeira at Delmonico's, some
terrapin with amontillado at the Waldorf--and so on.

One of the conse