For Mrs. ——­ is the daughter of a commercial man, one of the principals of a great firm, and has been accustomed to these things from her youth upwards.  She has no sympathies with the past, that even yet is loth to quit its hold of the soil and of those who are bred upon it.  The ancient simplicity and plainness of country life are positively repulsive to her; she associates them with poverty.  Her sympathies are with warm, well-lighted rooms, full of comfort, shadowless because of the glare of much gas.  She is not vulgar, just the reverse—­she is a thorough lady, but she is not of the country and its traditions.  She is the city and the suburb transplanted to the midst of corn, and grass, and cattle.  She has her maid, skilled in the toilet, her carriage and pair and pony carriage, grooms, footmen, just exactly as she would have done had she brought her magnificent dowry to a villa at Sydenham.

In the season, with her daughter, she goes to town, and drives daily in the park, just the same as to-day she has driven through the leaf-strewn country-lane to the market town.  They go also to the sea-side, and now and then to the Continent.  They are, of course, invited to the local balls, and to many of the best houses on more private occasions.  The ramifications of finance do not except the proudest descendants of the Crusaders, and the ‘firm’ has its clients even among them.  Bonnets come down from Madame Louise, boxes of novels from Mudie’s; ‘Le Follet’ is read in the original, and many a Parisian romance as well.  Visitors are continually coming and going—­the carriage is perpetually backwards and forwards to the distant railway station.  Friends come to the shooting, the hunting, the fishing; there is never any lack of society.

The house is full of servants, and need be, to wait upon these people.  Now, in former days, and not such a great while since, the best of servants came from the country.  Mistresses sought for them, and mourned when, having imbibed town ways and town independence, they took their departure to ‘better’ themselves.  But that is a thing of the past; it is gone with the disappearance of the old style of country life.  Servant girls in farmhouses when young used to have a terribly hard life:  hard work, hard fare, up early of a morning, stone flags under foot by day, bare boards under foot upstairs, small pay, and hard words too often.  But they turned out the best of women, the healthiest and strongest, the most sought after.  Now they learn a great deal about Timbuctoo, and will soon, no doubt, about Cyprus; but the ‘servant from the country’ is no more.  Nothing less will suit them to begin with than the service of the parish clergyman, then they aspire to the Grange, get there, and receive a finishing education, and can never afterwards condescend to go where a footman is not kept.  They become, in short, fine ladies, whose fathers are still at the plough—­ladies who at home have been glad of bread and bacon, and now cannot possibly survive without hot butcher’s meat every day, and game and fish in their seasons.