To the solitary man the well-seasoned tube is an invaluable companion.  If he happen, once in a way, to have nothing special to do and plenty of time in which to do it, he naturally fills his pipe as he draws the easy-chair on to the hearthrug, and knows not that he is lonely.  If he have a difficult problem to solve, he just as naturally attacks it over a pipe.  It is true that as the smoke-wreaths ring themselves above his head, his mind may wander off into devious paths of reverie, and the problem be utterly forgotten.  Well, that is, at least, something for which to be grateful, for the paths of reverie are the paths of pleasantness and peace, and problems can usually afford to wait.

“Over a pipe!” Why the words bring up innumerable pleasant associations.  The angler, having caught the coveted prize, refills his pipe, and with the satisfied sense of duty done, as the rings curl upward he reviews the struggle and glows again with victory.  At the end of any day’s occupation, especially one of pleasurable toil—­whether it be shooting or hunting, or walking or what not—­what can be pleasanter than to let the mind meander through the course of the day’s proceedings over a pipe?

There is much wisdom in Robert Louis Stevenson’s remarks in “Virginibus Puerisque”—­“Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke.  It is not for nothing that this ‘ignoble tabagie,’ as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world.  Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil influence in married life.  Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness.”

Nothing is more marked in the change in the social attitude towards tobacco than the revolution which has taken place in woman’s view of smoking.  The history of smoking by women is dealt with separately in the next chapter; but here it may be noted that most of the old intolerance of tobacco has disappeared.  “To smoke in Hyde Park,” said the late Lady Dorothy Nevill, in 1907, “even up to comparatively recent years, was looked upon as absolutely unpardonable, while smoking anywhere with a lady would have been classed as an almost disgraceful social crime.”

Women do not nowadays shun the smell of smoke as they did in early Victorian days, as if it were the most dreadful of odours.  They are tolerant of smoking in their presence, in public places, in restaurants—­in fact, wherever men and women congregate—­to a degree that would have horrified extremely their mothers and grandmothers.  It is only within the last few years that visits to music-halls and theatres of varieties have been socially possible to ladies.  Men go largely because they can smoke during the performance; women go largely because they have ceased to consider tobacco-smoke as a thing to be rigidly avoided, and therefore have no hesitation in accompanying their menfolk.