And even suppose that you escaped from these things, the real problems of your life had still to be faced.  It was not enough to keep alive; you had your career—­your duties as a leader of Society.  There was the daily mail, with all the pitiful letters from people begging money—­actually in one single week there were demands for two million dollars.  There were geniuses with patent incubators and stove-lifters, and every time you gave a ball you stirred up swarms of anarchists and cranks.  And then there were the letters you really had to answer, and the calls that had to be paid.  These latter were so many that people in the same neighbourhood had arranged to have the same day at home; thus, if you lived on Madison Avenue you had Thursday; but even then it took a whole afternoon to leave your cards.  And then there were invitations to be sent and accepted; and one was always making mistakes and offending somebody—­people would become mortal enemies overnight, and expect all the world to know it the next morning.  And now there were so many divorces and remarryings, with consequent changing of names; and some men knew about their wives’ lovers and didn’t care, and some did care, but didn’t know—­altogether it was like carrying a dozen chess games in your head.  And then there was the hairdresser and the manicurist and the masseuse, and the tailor and the bootmaker and the jeweller; and then one absolutely had to glance through a newspaper, and to see one’s children now and then.

All this Mrs. Robbie explained at luncheon; it was the rich man’s burden, about which common people had no conception whatever.  A person with a lot of money was like a barrel of molasses—­all the flies in the neighbourhood came buzzing about.  It was perfectly incredible, the lengths to which people would go to get invited to your house; not only would they write and beg you, they might attack your business interests, and even bribe your friends.  And on the other hand, when people thought you needed them, the time you had to get them to come!  “Fancy,” said Mrs. Robbie, “offering to give a dinner to an English countess, and having her try to charge you for coming!” And incredible as it might seem, some people had actually yielded to her, and the disgusting creature had played the social celebrity for a whole season, and made quite a handsome income out of it.  There seemed to be no limit to the abjectness of some of the tuft-hunters in Society.

It was instructive to hear Mrs. Robbie denounce such evils; and yet—­alas for human frailty—­the next time that Montague called, the great lady was blazing with wrath over the tidings that a new foreign prince was coming to America, and that Mrs. Ridgely-Clieveden had stolen a march upon her and grabbed him.  He was to be under her tutelage the entire time, and all the effulgence of his magnificence would be radiated upon that upstart house.  Mrs. Robbie revenged herself by saying as many disagreeable things about Mrs. Ridgley-Clieveden as she could think of; winding up with the declaration that if she behaved with this prince as she had with the Russian grand duke, Mrs. Robbie Walling, for one, would cut her dead.  And truly the details which Mrs. Robbie cited were calculated to suggest that her rival’s hospitality was a reversion to the customs of primitive savagery.