Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner--the dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and apologise--"I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for dinner!" and "Why, of course! I forgot it was so late!--dear me! the Jenkinses will have come before me if I don't hurry home!" On what ground, then, is that dinner given--why are the Jenkinses asked that night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still sacred spirit of friendship?
Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain--and who so carefully retaliate, card for card, _plat_ for _plat_ and dollar for dollar--are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us _when we are not entertaining_!
Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally, spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer's camping, than ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is neither cause nor result of that strange process.
What, then, is "entertainment," to which the home is sacrificed so utterly--which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of hospitality or friendship?
On what line of social evolution may we trace the growth of this amazing phenomenon; this constant gathering together of many people to eat when they are not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their absurd position that the hostess must needs hire all manner of paid performers wherewith to "entertain" them?