Lady Caroline Sellwood's incomparable Wednesdays were so salient a feature of those seasons during which her husband was in office, and her town house in St. James's Square, that their standard is still quoted as the ideal of its kind. These afternoons were never dull. Lady Caroline cast a broad net, and her average draught included representatives of every decent section of the community. But she also possessed some secret recipe, the envy and the despair of other professional hostesses, and in her rooms there was never an undue preponderance of any one social ingredient. Every class--above a certain line, not drawn too high--was represented; none was over done; nor was the mistake made of "packing" the assembly with interesting people. The very necessary complement of the merely interested was never wanting. One met beauty as well as brains; wealth as well as wit; and quite as many colourless nonentities as notorieties of every hue. The proportion was always perfect, but not more so than the general good-temper of the guests. They foregathered like long-lost brothers and sisters: the demagogue and the divine; the judge and the junior; the oldest lady and the newest woman; the amateur playwright and the actor-manager who had lost his play; the minor novelist and the young lady who had never heard of him; and my Lords and Ladies (whose carriages half-filled the Square) with the very least of these. It was wonderful to see them together; it was a solemn thought, but yet a fact, that their heavenly behaviour was due simply and entirely to the administrative genius of Lady Caroline Sellwood. The Home Secretary hated the Wednesdays; he was the one person who did; and _he_ only hated them because they _were_ Wednesdays--and from the period of his elderly infatuation for golf. It was his great day for a round; and Lady Caroline had to make his excuses every week when it was fine. This was another thing which her Ladyship did beautifully. She would say, with a voice full of sympathy, equally divided between those mutual losers, her guest and her husband, that poor dear George had to address such and such a tiresome deputation; when, as a matter of fact, he was "addressing" his golf-hall on Wimbledon Common, and enjoying himself exceedingly. Now, among other Wednesdays, the Home Secretary was down at Wimbledon (with a prominent member of the Opposition) on the afternoon following the arrival in London of the ninth Duke of St. Osmund's; and Mr. Sellwood never knew whether to pity his wife, or to congratulate himself, on his absence from her side on that occasion.