The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding--some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present owners--have been houses which represented for me that old order of things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family traditions and associations--elements rooted in the soil of a national and immemorial past--such were the factors by which the life of these houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits--many of them very bad--on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses, except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent, while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element. Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong resemblance to Catholic society in London. But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward. What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?