Wherefore those misguided women are to be reprobated who, having the means at their disposal to create an English home, use them to produce the illusion of a cosmopolitan hotel. This crime, whether it be due to American influence and example, or only inspired by the mad desire to spend an unnecessary amount of money, must fortunately be rare, if it is unfortunately conspicuous. It is almost impossible to believe that one of English blood who in youth has known any of the spell thrown over the existence of those who share it by an English home can have the misguided courage to banish voluntarily so much that is precious from their life. A home can be rich as well as poor, as complete in a palace as in a cottage, but those who land themselves in great houses which they cannot assimilate, filling them with objects for which they have neither affection nor reverence, creating no atmosphere but that of magnificence, asking for no service but that of well-paid but stingily given obsequiousness, who gather guests as carelessly as the footman shovels coal and disperse them as nonchalantly as the housemaid scatters ashes, having thrown before them all the impersonal luxuries of which a Ritz can boast—those are the people who have forgotten what home, what comfort, what cosiness, what an English hearth, an English gathering round an English fire, an English muffin, an English welcome can be to those who have not lost one of the most desirable sweets of their nationality, how gracious their appeal to the happily present, how warm and soothing their memory to the unwillingly absent.