Charles Lamb complained humorously of the behaviour of married people in this respect, but his complaints have no great body in them. A friendship that depended mainly upon bachelor roysterings must inevitably suffer by a roysterer’s marriage, but to accuse the English wife of wishing to destroy what is valuable in her husband’s feelings for other men or women is to do her an injustice. Indeed, I have often found the anxiety of English wives to prove the contrary almost pathetic, and it may be advanced as a reasonable proposition that the man who exchanges his welcome in a bachelor flat for one in an English home has the better of the exchange. The note of the English home, except in its most ceremonial moments, is domesticity, not a domesticity of shirtsleeves and happy-go-luckydom, but one in which the domestic affections do not find it necessary to run and hide themselves in the closet when the frontdoor bell rings, and in which an increase in the steam pressure of the domestic machinery is not obviously made for the comfort of added society. The guest slides into an English home, be it for an evening or for a month, as easily as a new leaf is slid into the dining-room table. If any sacrifices are made on his behalf, it is a matter of pride that he should be unaware of them: if his pleasures are consulted it is, for him, with the assurance that the meeting of them would only be an extension, the most natural in the world, of the admirable activities of his host and hostess.