Making Bread Pills

A young man in white tie sits marooned at center, staring blankly forward while roses heap the table before him—a visual joke on the Gilded Age custom of showering fashionable women with flowers. To his left, a Gibson Girl in low décolletage leans conspiratorially toward another man, ignoring her host entirely; to his right, a second woman does the same with yet another companion. The suitor, lavish and spurned, rolls invisible bread pills—a period idiom for nervous, idle fidgeting at table. Gibson's line is cool and clinical: no caption is needed. The cartoon's argument is about money wasted on women who treat courtship as theater, their escorts as props, and their actual hosts as furniture.