Montague found himself thinking that perhaps it was not they who were to blame.  It was not they who had set up wealth as the end and goal of things—­it was the whole community, of which they were a part.  It was not their fault that they had been left with power and nothing to use it for; it was not their fault that their sons and daughters found themselves stranded in the world, deprived of all necessity, and of the possibility of doing anything useful.

The most pitiful aspect of the whole thing to Montague was this “second generation” who were coming upon the scene, with their lives all poisoned in advance.  No wrong which they could do to the world would ever equal the wrong which the world had done them, in permitting them to have money which they had not earned.  They were cut off for ever from reality, and from the possibility of understanding life; they had big, healthy bodies, and they craved experience—­and they had absolutely nothing to do.  That was the real meaning of all this orgy of dissipation—­this “social whirl” as it was called; it was the frantic chase of some new thrill, some excitement that would stir the senses of people who had nothing in the world to interest them.  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 Alderi’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.