twice the sum demanded for their day's pleasure. Such people may be stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are helped in their turn.
In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we pay—for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring—for something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions—or for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society, yet die as they have lived—social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it, seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and show them that—thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder test, as they may be—they are by no means to be trusted with the amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that, how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality, they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in society—and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay their shot, and their difficulties would vanish. They would leave off repeating the fable of Sisyphus, and attain completion of endeavour. No one need say this is a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow it in practice. Among the people we invite to our houses are some whom we do not specially like, but whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind. There are people who may be personally disagreeable, ill-educated, uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we cannot cut because of the relations in which we stand towards them, and who take their place by right, because they pay their shot with punctuality. There are others whom we ask because of liking or desirability, and shot paid in some specific form of pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good manner, notoriety; but there are none absolutely barren of all gifts of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected honour to ourselves, and of social small-change according to the currency. We do not go into the byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatterdemalions who bring nothing with them and are simply so much deadweight on the rest, occupying so much valuable space and consuming so much vital energy. The law of reciprocity may be hard on the strivers who are ignorant of its inexorable provisions; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules and enactments against remediable pauperism. And were we once thoroughly to understand that, if we would sit securely at the table we must put something of value into the pool—that we must possess advantageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as the shot to be paid for our place—the art of society would be better cultivated than it is now, and the classification of guests would be carried out with greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being gracious in manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant appearance generally—all cultivable qualities, and to be learned if not born in us by nature—were accepted as an absolute necessity, without which we must expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-rooms would be far brighter and dinner-tables far pleasanter than they are at present; to the advantage of all concerned! And, after all, society is a great thing in human life. If not equal in importance to the family, or to political virtue, it has its own special value; and whatever adds to its better organization is a gain in every sense.
WHAT IS WOMAN'S WORK?
This is a question which one half the world is at this moment asking the other half; with very wild answers as the result. Woman's work seems to be in these days everything that it was not in times past, and nothing that it was. Professions are undertaken and careers invaded which were formerly held sacred to men; while things are left undone which, for all the generations that the world has lasted, have been naturally and instinctively assigned to women to do. From the savage squaw gathering fuel or drawing water for the wigwam, to the lady giving up the keys to her housekeeper, housekeeping has been considered one of the primary functions of women. The man to provide—the woman to dispense; the man to do the rough initial work of bread-winning, whether as a half-naked barbarian hunting live meat or as a City clerk painfully scoring lines of rugged figures—the woman to cook the meat when got, and to lay out to the best advantage for the family the quarter's salary gained by casting up ledgers and writing advices and bills of lading. Take human society in any phase we like, we must come down to these radical conditions; and any system which ignores this division of labour, and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that particular set of workers. But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income, but who might both save and improve in the home; women whose lives are one long day of idleness, ennui and vagrant imagination, because they despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets for their energies impossible to them both by functional and social restrictions.
It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active housekeeping—first social duty—has fallen in England. Take a family with four or five hundred a year—and we know how small a sum that is for 'genteel humanity' in these days—the wife who is an active housekeeper, even with such an income, is an exception to the rule; and the daughters who are anything more than drawing-room dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own, where they may be as useless as they are now, are rarer still. For things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less useful even than were their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come near the housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret of domestic economy and made a wise and pleasant 'distribution of bread' their grand point of honour. The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when they call. If she be not very indolent, and if she have a due regard for neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of advice to the housemaid if she be sweet-tempered, or a harsh note of censure if she be of the cross-grained type, her work in that department will be done, and her duties for the day are at an end. There is none of the clever marketing by which fifty per cent. is saved in the outlay, if a woman knows what she is about and how to buy;
