The meaning of it all did not stop with the people who poured it forth; its effects were to be traced through the whole country.  There were hordes of tradesmen and manufacturers who supplied what Society bought, and whose study it was to induce people to buy as much as possible.  And so they devised what were called “fashions”—­little eccentricities of cut and material, which made everything go out of date quickly.  There had once been two seasons, but now there were four; and through window displays and millions of advertisements the public was lured into the trap.  The “yellow” journals would give whole pages to describing “What the 400 are wearing”; there were magazines with many millions of readers, which existed for nothing save to propagate these ideas.  And everywhere, in all classes of Society, men and women were starving their minds and hearts, and straining their energies to follow this phantom of fashion; the masses were kept poor because of it, and the youth and hope of the world was betrayed by it.  In country villages poor farmers’ wives were trimming their bonnets over to be “stylish”; and servant-girls in the cities were wearing imitation sealskins, and shop-clerks and sempstresses selling themselves into brothels for the sake of ribbons and gilt jewellery.

It was the instinct of decoration, perverted by the money-lust.  In the Metropolis the sole test of excellence was money, and the possession of money was the proof of power; and every natural desire of men and women had been tainted by this influence.  The love of beauty, the impulse to hospitality, the joys of music and dancing and love—­all these things had become simply means to the demonstration of money-power!  The men were busy making more money—­ but their idle women had nothing in life save this mad race in display.  So it had come about that the woman who could consume wealth most conspicuously—­who was the most effective instrument for the destroying of the labour and the lives of other people—­this was the woman who was most applauded and most noticed.

The most appalling fact about Society was this utter blind materialism.  Such expectations as Montague had brought with him had been derived from the literature of Europe; in a grand monde such as this, he expected to meet diplomats and statesmen, scientists and explorers, philosophers and poets and painters.  But one never heard anything about such people in Society.  It was a mark of eccentricity to be interested in intellectual affairs, and one might go about for weeks and not meet a person with an idea.  When these people read, it was a sugar-candy novel, and when they went to the play, it was a musical comedy.  The one single intellectual product which it could point to as its own, was a rancid scandal-sheet, used mainly as a moans of blackmail.  Now and then some aspiring young matron of the “elite” would try to set up a salon after the fashion of the continent, and would gather a few feeble wits about her for a time.  But for the most part the intellectual workers of the city held themselves severely aloof; and Society was loft a little clique of people whose fortunes had become historic in a decade or two, and who got together in each other’s palaces and gorged themselves, and gambled and gossiped about each other, and wove about their personalities a veil of awful and exclusive majesty.