My father-in-law and she had known each other many years, and at the luncheon table he sat beside her and kept up a conversation with her. She said very little, and with her eyes most often on her plate, like a person who is polite, but distracted by illness, and incapable of rousing the mind. The English Royal Family has the sensible habit of dining without the ladies-in-waiting, who take their meals in another room; so we were _en famille_; and the conversation was that of intimate domestic interests and the little social happenings of the day. One could hardly find a family more charming, more serene, more simply happy. And the explanation of this air of the English Court is easily found. England is a country of accepted classes, of which each class makes no infringement on the rights of the class above it and fears none from the class below. There are even upper and lower servants in a household. And each class receives servility from the class below it to reimburse it for the servility that it pays to the class above. Royalty is just a final upper class, neither envied by an aristocracy which cannot aspire to it, nor feared by the lower classes over which it has no authority. It is a social ornament of government, a symbol of national majesty. The aristocracy is almost equally ornamental, with certain appearances of power that are allowed it by the sufferance of the rest. The real government is the commerce and industry of the nation. It is a commercial empire, ruled by considerations of trade, but disguising itself, even to itself, by forms of administration that are aristocratic, with an established church in a nation largely nonconformist, a military power that in the main engages in wars for the extension or protection of commercial interests, and an ideal of empire for humanitarian ends--at the same time making it pay. You will always hear, for example, of the devoted self-sacrifice of the British rule in India, which carries the peaceful blessings of civilisation to natives incapable of self-government; but if India were being held at a continual loss to the British tax-payer--if he had to pay out of his own purse, without return, to protect the natives from their own incapacity--I wonder whether the British Empire in India would last a year. It is this faculty of almost honest self-deception which makes the Englishman so insoluble a puzzle to the foreigner.