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It would save much useless striving and needless disappointment if the necessity of paying one's shot were honestly accepted as absolute—if it were understood, once for all, that society, like other manifestations of humanity, is managed on the principle of exchange and barter, and equivalents demanded for value received. The benevolence which gives out of its own impulse, with no hope of reward save in the well-being of the recipient, has no place in the drawing-room code of morals. We may keep a useless creature from starving at the cost of so much of our substance per diem, for the sole remuneration of thanks and the consciousness of an equivocal act of charity; but who among us opens his doors, or gives a seat at his table, to drawing-room paupers unable to pay their shot? who cares to cultivate the acquaintance of men or women who are unable to make him any return? It is not necessary that this return should be in kind—a dinner for a dinner, a champagne supper for a champagne supper, and balls with waxed floors for balls with stretched linen; but shot must be paid in some form, whether in kind or not, and the social pauper who cannot pay his quota is Lazarus excluded from the feast. This is a hard saying, but it is a true one. We often hear worthy people who do not understand this law complain that they are neglected—left out of wedding breakfasts—passed over in dinner invitations—and that they find it difficult to keep acquaintances when made. But the fact is, these poor creatures who know so much about the cold-shoulder of society are simply those who cannot pay their shot, according to the currency of the class to which they aspire; and so by degrees they get winnowed through the meshes, and fall to a level where their funds will suffice to meet all demands, triumphantly. For the rejected of one level are not necessarily the rejected of all, and the base metal of one currency is sound coinage in another. People who would find it impossible to enter a drawing-room in Grosvenor Square may have all Bloomsbury at their command; and what was caviare to My Lord will be ambrosia to his valet—all depending on the amount of the shot to be paid and the relative value of coinage wherewith to pay it.

The most simple form of payment is of course by the elemental process of reciprocity in kind; a dinner for a dinner and a supper for a supper:—a form as purely instinctive as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—the lex talionis of early jurisprudence administered among wine-cups instead of in the shambles. But there are other modes of payment as efficient if less evident, and as imperative if more subtle. For instance, women pay their shot—when they pay it individually, and not through the vicarious merits of their masculine relations—by dressing well and looking nice; some by being pretty; some by being fashionable; a few by brilliant talk; while all ought to add to their private speciality the generic virtue of pleasant manners. If they are not pretty, pleasant, well-dressed nor well-connected, and if they have no masculine pegs of power by which they can be hooked on to the higher lines, they are let to drop through the social meshes without an effort made to retain them, as little fishes swim away unopposed through the loops which hold the bigger ones. These things are their social duties—the final cause of their drawing-room existence; and if they fail in them they fail in the purpose for which they were created socially, and may die out as soon as convenient. They have other duties, of course, and doubtless of far higher moment and greater worth; but the question now is only of their drawing-room duties—of the qualities which secure their recognition in society—of the special coinage in which they must pay their shot if they would assist at the great banquet of social life. A dowdy, humdrum, well-principled woman, whose toilette looks as if it had been made with the traditionary pitchfork, and whose powers of conversation do not go beyond the strength of Cobwebs to Catch Flies, or Mangnall's Questions, may be an admirable wife, the painstaking mother of future honest citizens, invaluable by a sick-bed, beyond price in the nursery, a pattern of all household economies, a woman absolutely faultless in her sphere—and that sphere a very sweet and lovely one. But her virtues are not those by which she can pay her shot in society; and the motherly goodness, of so much account in a dressing-jacket and list-slippers, is put out of court when the fee to be paid is liveliness of manner or elegance of appearance. Certainly, worthy women who dress ill and look ungraceful, and whose conversation is about up to the mark of their children's easy-spelling-books, are plentiful in society—unfortunately for those bracketed with them for two hours' penance; but in most cases they have their shot paid for them by the wealth, the importance, the repute, or the desirableness of their relations. They may pay it themselves by their own wealth and consequent liberal tariff of reciprocity; but this is rare; the possession of personal superiority of any kind for the most part acting as a moral stimulus with women whom the superiority of their male belongings does not touch. And, by the way, it is rather hard lines that so many celebrated men have such dowdy wives. Artists, poets, self-made men of all kinds often fail in this special article; and, while they themselves have caught the tone of the circle to which they have risen, and pay their shot by manner as well as by repute, their wives lag behind among the ashes of the past, like Cinderellas before the advent of the fairy godmother. How many of them are carried through society as clogs or excrescences which a polite world is bound to tolerate with more or less equanimity, according to the amount of sensitiveness bestowed by nature and cultivated by art! Sometimes, however, self-made men and their wives are wise in their generation and understand the terms on which society receives its members; in which case the marital Reputation goes to the front alone, and the conjugal Cinderella rests tranquilly in the rear.

Notoriety of all kinds, short of murder or forgery, is one way of paying one's shot, specially into the coffers of the Leo Hunters, of whom there are many. It is shot paid to the general fund when one has seen an accident—better still, if one has been in it. Many a man has owed a rise in his scale of dinners to a railway smash; and to have been nearly burnt to death, to have escaped by a miracle from drowning, to have been set on by footpads or to have been visited by burglars, is worth a round of At Homes, because of the ready cash of a real adventure. To be connected more or less remotely with the fashionable tragedy of the hour is paying one's shot handsomely. To have been on speaking terms with the latest respectable scoundrel unmasked, or to have had dealings, sufficiently remote to have been cleanly, with the newest villainy, will be accepted as shot while the public interest in the matter lasts. A chance visit to ultra-grandees—grandees in ratio to the ordinary sphere—is shot paid with an air. A bad illness, or the attendance on one, with the apparently unconscious heroism of the details, comes in as part of the social fine; especially if the person relating his or her experience has the knack of epigram or exaggeration, while still keeping local colour and verisimilitude intact. Interesting people who have been abroad and seen things have good counters for a dinner-party; paying their shot for themselves and their hosts too, who put them forward as their contribution to the funds of the commonwealth, with certainty of acceptance. Some pay their shot by their power of procuring orders and free admissions. They know the manager of this theatre or the leading actor of that; they are acquainted with the principal members of the hanging committees, and are therefore great in private views; they are always good for a gratuitous treat to folks who can afford to pay twice the sum demanded for their day's pleasure. Such people may be stupid, ungainly, not specially polished, in grain unpleasant; but they circulate in society because they pay their shot and give back equivalents for value received. A country-house, where there is a good tennis-ground and a blushing bed of strawberries, is coinage that will carry the possessor very far ahead through London society; and by the same law you will find healthy, well-conditioned country folk tolerate undeniable little snobs of low calibre because of that sixteen-roomed house in Tyburnia, a visit to which represents so many concerts, so many theatres, a given number of exhibitions, and a certain quantity of operas and parties. Had those undeniable little snobs no funds wherewith to pay their shot, they would have had no place kept for them among the rose-trees and the strawberry-beds; but, bringing their quota as they do, they take their seat with the rest and are helped in their turn.

In fact, humiliating to our self-love as it may be, the truth is, we are all valued socially, not for ourselves integrally, not for the mere worth of the naked soul, but for the kind of shot that we pay—for the advantage or amusement to others that we can bring—for something in ourselves which renders us desirable as companions—or for something belonging to our condition which makes us remunerative as guests. If we have no special qualification, if we neither look nice nor talk well, neither bring glory nor confer pleasure, we must expect to be shunted to the side in favour of others who are up to the right mark and who give as much as they receive. If this truth were once fully established as a matter of social science, a great advance would be made; for nothing helps people so much as to clear a subject of what fog may lie about it. And as the tendency of the age is to discover the fixed laws which regulate the mutable affairs of man, it would be just as well to extend the inquiry from the jury-box to the dinner-table, and from the blue-book to the visiting-list. Why is it that some people struggle all their lives to get a footing in society, yet die as they have lived—social Sisyphuses, never accomplishing their perpetually-recurring task? There must be a reason for it, seeing that nothing is ruled by blind chance, though much seems to lie outside the independent will of the individual. Enlighten these worthy people's minds on the unwritten laws of invitation, and show them that—thoroughly honest souls and to be trusted with untold gold or with their neighbour's pretty wife, which is perhaps a harder test, as they may be—they are by no means to be trusted with the amusement of a couple of companions at a dinner-table. Show them that, how rich soever they may be in the rough gold of domestic morality, they are bankrupts in the small-change which alone passes current in society—and, if invited where they aspire to be, they would be taken on as pauper cousins unable to pay their footing and good for neither meat nor garnish. Let them learn how to pay their shot, and their difficulties would vanish. They would leave off repeating the fable of Sisyphus, and attain completion of endeavour. No one need say this is a hard or a selfish doctrine, for we all follow it in practice. Among the people we invite to our houses are some whom we do not specially like, but whom we must ask because of shot paid in kind. There are people who may be personally disagreeable, ill-educated, uninteresting, ungainly, but whom we cannot cut because of the relations in which we stand towards them, and who take their place by right, because they pay their shot with punctuality. There are others whom we ask because of liking or desirability, and shot paid in some specific form of pleasantness, as in beauty, fashion, good manner, notoriety; but there are none absolutely barren of all gifts of pleasantness to the guests, of reflected honour to ourselves, and of social small-change according to the currency. We do not go into the byways and hedges to pick up drawing-room tatterdemalions who bring nothing with them and are simply so much deadweight on the rest, occupying so much valuable space and consuming so much vital energy. The law of reciprocity may be hard on the strivers who are ignorant of its inexorable provisions; but it is a wholesome law, like other rules and enactments against remediable pauperism. And were we once thoroughly to understand that, if we would sit securely at the table we must put something of value into the pool—that we must possess advantageous circumstances, or personal desirabilities, as the shot to be paid for our place—the art of society would be better cultivated than it is now, and the classification of guests would be carried out with greater judgment. Surely, if the need of being gracious in manner, sprightly in talk, and of pleasant appearance generally—all cultivable qualities, and to be learned if not born in us by nature—were accepted as an absolute necessity, without which we must expect to be overlooked and excluded, drawing-rooms would be far brighter and dinner-tables far pleasanter than they are at present; to the advantage of all concerned! And, after all, society is a great thing in human life. If not equal in importance to the family, or to political virtue, it has its own special value; and whatever adds to its better organization is a gain in every sense.