a nucleus, and the property of a nucleus is that it has the power of
attracting to itself particles out of the surrounding nebulous vapor. It
grows as it attracts, and it attracts more strongly as it grows.

An illustration of this principle is in the fact that, but for the
misgiving, she would hardly have asked Simone Gréville what she meant by
saying that though she had always supposed the fundamental sex
attraction between men and women to be the same in its essentials, in
all epochs and in all civilizations, her acquaintance with upper-class
American women was leading her to admit a possible exception.

Since that amiable celestial, Wu Ting Fang, made his survey of our
western civilization and left us wondering whether after all we had the
right name for it, no one has studied our leisured and cultivated
classes with more candor and penetration than this great Franco-Austrian
actress. She had ample opportunities for observation, because during the
first week of her tour the precise people who count the most in our
informal social hierarchy took her up and, upon examination, took her
in. Playing in English as she did, and with an American supporting
company, she did not make a great financial success (the Continental
technique, especially when contrasted so intimately with the one we are
familiar with does not attract us), but socially she was a sensation. So
during her four weeks in Chicago, while she played to houses that
couldn't be dressed to look more than a third full, she was enormously
in demand for luncheons, teas, dinners, suppers, Christmas bazaars,
charity dances and so on. (If it had only been possible to establish a
scale of fees for these functions, her manager used to reflect
despairingly, he might have come out even after all.) Any other sort of
engagement melted away like snow in the face of an opportunity of
meeting Simone Gréville.