time to look at the beautiful things that leaned and beckoned from the walls.  There was no chance of quiet, reasonable talk; one pumped up a few inanities to person after person.  I suppose that most of the guests would not have come if they did not at all events think it amused them; but what was the charm?  I suppose that to most of the guests it was the stir, the light, the moving figures—­for there were many beautiful and stately women and distinguished men present—­the sense of company, warmth, success, about it all.  To me it was merely distracting—­a score of sources of pleasure, and all of them preventing the enjoyment of each.  I think I am probably more and not less sensitive to all these fine and rare things than perhaps most people; and I suppose it is this very sensitiveness that makes me averse to them all in mass.  It is to me like the jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument.  I felt that I could have lingered alone in these fine rooms, wandering from picture to picture with a lively pleasure.  There were many people present with whom I should have deeply enjoyed a tete-a-tete.  But the whole effect was like over-eating oneself, like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in a single meal.  I do not protest against such gatherings on principle; if they give the guests a sense of pleasure and well-being, I have not a word to say against it all.  But I believe in my heart that there are many people who do not really enjoy it, or enjoy it only in a purely conventional way; and what I should like to do is to assist the people whose enjoyment of it is conventional, to find out simpler and more real sources of happiness; because to make these great houses possible there is a vast amount of patient and unpraised human labour wasted.  I do not think labour is wasted in producing beautiful things, so long as they can have an effect; but a superabundance of beauty has no effect—­no effect, at least, that could not be produced by things less costly of effort and skill.  The very refreshments, which hardly any one touched, stand for an amount of wasted labour which might have given pleasure to the poor toilers who produced them.  Think of the ransacking of different climates, of the ships speeding over the sea, the toil of gatherers, porters, cooks, servers, that went to fit out that sparkling buffet.  I suppose that it is easy for me, who do not value the result, to be mildly socialistic about these things; the pathos is not in the work, but in the waste of the work, not in the delicate things collected for our use and however fitfully enjoyed, but in the things made and collected by unknown toilers, and then either not used at all or not consciously enjoyed.