Amongst men social distinctions are very slight.  It is lawful to be friendly with everybody and anybody in town, so long as you do not visit at his private house.  And yet for very obvious reasons gentlemen are—­except amongst the rising generation—­much more common than ladies.  A number of wild young men of good family and education have been poured out of England into Australia ever since 1852, and many of them have become amongst the most useful and respected colonists.  But until recently there was a paucity of ladies, and the majority of gentlemen had but the choice between marrying beneath them or not at all.  Hence frequent mesalliances.  You meet a man at the club, and are delighted with him in every way.  He asks you to his house, and you find that his wife drops her h’s, eats peas with her knife, and errs in various little ways.  I am purposely thinking of no one in particular, but fear at least a dozen of my acquaintances will think I am writing of them in making this remark.  And it is a sad sight to see a man dragged down in this way, for very few men who marry beneath them can keep up the manner and mode of living to which they were born and educated, while those who do generally retain them at the expense of their own married happiness.  Nowadays there are certainly plenty of young ladies in the towns, but for all that one constantly hears of the sons of clergymen and army officers marrying the daughters of grocers and farmers who were quite recently day-labourers.  With every freedom from caste prejudice, I am yet unable to see anything but harm to the persons directly concerned in these ill-assorted matches, whatever the good result to the community may be.

The centre round which society revolves is naturally Government House, but a great many people go to Government House who cannot be considered to be in society.  To have been to a Government House ball is no more, mutandis mutatis, than to go to a Court ball at home.  Neither will give you admission into the inner circle; and though that circle may not offer any but specious advantages and have but little to recommend it in preference to three or four other societies in the town, admission into it is coveted, and inclusion within its boundaries is as much a reality as if its walls were of stone.  In Melbourne the scattered position of the suburbs and the extent of the population splits up the elite into several local societies, but there is yet one creme de la creme.  In Sydney the same thing takes place, though the local societies are less numerous; but in Adelaide there is practically only one ‘society’, the local aggregations of individuals not being deserving of any more dignified name than ‘cliques.’  Of the three societies, that of Sydney is on the whole, I think, the best.  At Melbourne there are probably a larger number of cultivated persons, but the distance between the suburbs and the more extravavagant mode of living limits their sphere.  The Adelaidians