isolated and separate, because all the talk is local and personal, about your little world, and the affairs of your clique, and your petty interests, in which he or she cannot possibly join?  Ah! the Sioux Indian would not be so cruel as that to a guest.  There is no more refined torture to a sensitive person than that.  Is it only thoughtlessness?  It is more than that.  It is a want of sympathy of the heart, or it is a lack of intelligence and broad-minded interest in affairs of the world and in other people.  It is this trait—­absorption in self—­pervading society more or less, that makes it so unsatisfactory to most people in it.  Just a want of human interest; people do not come in contact.

Avid pursuit of wealth, or what is called pleasure, perhaps makes people hard to each other, and infuses into the higher social life, which should be the most unselfish and enjoyable life, a certain vulgarity, similar to that noticed in well-bred tourists scrambling for the seats on top of a mountain coach.  A person of refinement and sensibility and intelligence, cast into the company of the select, the country-house, the radiant, twelve-button society, has been struck with infinite pity for it, and asks the Drawer to do something about it.  The Drawer cannot do anything about it.  It can only ask the prayers of all good people on Christmas Day for the rich.  As we said, we do not have them with us always—­they are here today, they are gone to Canada tomorrow.  But this is, of course, current facetiousness.  The rich are as good as anybody else, according to their lights, and if what is called society were as good and as kind to itself as it is to the poor, it would be altogether enviable.  We are not of those who say that in this case, charity would cover a multitude of sins, but a diffusion in society of the Christmas sentiment of goodwill and kindliness to itself would tend to make universal the joy on the return of this season.

SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE

The Drawer would like to emphasize the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of American women.  There are none like them in the world.  They take up all the burdens of artificial foreign usage, where social caste prevails, and bear them with a heroism worthy of a worse cause.  They indeed represent these usages to be a burden almost intolerable, and yet they submit to them with a grace and endurance all their own.  Probably there is no harder-worked person than a lady in the season, let us say in Washington, where the etiquette of visiting is carried to a perfection that it does not reach even in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, and where woman’s effort to keep the social fabric together requires more expenditure of intellect and of physical force than was needed to protect the capital in its peril a quarter of a century ago.  When this cruel war is over, the monument to the women who perished in it will need to be higher than that