The plutocratic peer who ordinarily maintained a "place" at the seashore, an estate in Middlesex or Devon, and a town-house in Berkeley Square had probably long ago handed over the "place" and the estate for military hospital purposes--hardly a mansion or manor-house in England to-day is devoted to any other use--and now retrenchment became for him the order of the day in London, too. His stable of thoroughbreds almost vanished in the early days of the war, for the needs of the cavalry and the artillery were insatiable and undiscriminating, and now his _garage_ was down to a war basis--the most plebeian car he ever drove; the others were in army service either in England or "somewhere in France." Sackville Street and Albemarle Street, Bond Street and Regent Street, where smart clothes and other expensive trinkets for men and women were formerly sold, became deserted. Men’s tailors displayed nothing but khaki in their windows, and Paquin’s, Redfern’s and Worth’s languished as if England were famine-blighted. Society faded away as if pestilence had swept Uppertendom into oblivion. Women of Britain’s first families were almost ashamed to be seen in anything more chic than the livery of mourning, and by midsummer of 1915 black was pitiably fashionable and omnipresent. "Entertaining" had been a lost art for months. "Going in for it" now seemed and was sacrilege. Indulged at all, it was excusable only if it had the extenuating excuse of having been arranged, and then in the most modest of ways, for one’s wounded or recuperating officer friends, back from Hell or on the eve of going there--"somewhere in France." It was war-time in England at last.