Publisher's Synopsis
Its opening incidents may be dated from a period when people still had reason to believe in permanency and had indeed many of them-sometimes through ingenuousness, sometimes through stupidity of type-acquired a singular confidence in the importance and stability of their possessions, desires, ambitions and forms of conviction.London at the time, in common with other great capitals, felt itself rather final though priding itself on being much more fluid and adaptable than it had been fifty years previously. In speaking of itself it at least dealt with fixed customs, and conditions and established facts connected with them-which gave rise to brilliant-or dull-witticisms.
