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