e
season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual
springtime. How would you like that?"

Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry. He,
too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and he
would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora's impatience
with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of his greatest
amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that law of the
universal life by which no human creature is permitted to escape a due
share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common lot, or realized
that to seek escape from them is a species of immorality which is
unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and from itself.

IX

TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING

As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and money to
waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for squandering both,
find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who
have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is
that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person
who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable
disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the
accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal
peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true
diner must be well on in middle life, for though the young may eat and
drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray head difficultly
bowed over the successive courses, and the full form of third youth
straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it,
that the vision presents itself when one thinks of dinners and diners.

After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large that
one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than attach
itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of
dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger or
smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet a
step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part elderly
men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need not be
counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to throng
the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit, looking
down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of