Today, if you call at such a country house, how strangely different is the reception!  None of the family come to the door to meet you.  A servant shows you into a parlour—­drawing-room is the proper word now—­well carpeted and furnished in the modern style.  She then takes your name—­what a world of change is shown in that trifling piece of etiquette!  By-and-by, after the proper interval, the ladies enter in morning costume, not a stray curl allowed to wander from its stern bands, nature rigidly repressed, decorum—­’Society’—­in every flounce and trimming.  You feel that you have committed a solecism coming on foot, and so carrying the soil on your boots from the fields without into so elegant an apartment Visitors are obviously expected to arrive on wheels, and in correct trim for company.  A remark about the crops falls on barren ground; a question concerning the dairy, ignorantly hazarded, is received with so much hauteur that at last you see such subjects are considered vulgar.  Then a touch of the bell, and decanters of port and sherry are produced and our wine presented to you on an electro salver together with sweet biscuits.  It is the correct thing to sip one glass and eat one biscuit.

The conversation is so insipid, so entirely confined to the merest platitudes, that it becomes absolutely a relief to escape.  You are not pressed to stay and dine, as you would have been in the old days—­not because there is a lack of hospitality, but because they would prefer a little time for preparation in order that the dinner might be got up in polite style.  So you depart—­chilled and depressed.  No one steps with you to open the gate and exchange a second farewell, and express a cordial wish to see you again there.  You feel that you must walk in measured step and place your hat precisely perpendicular, for the eyes of ‘Society’ are upon you.  What a comfort when you turn a corner behind the hedge and can thrust your hands into your pockets and whistle!

The young ladies, however, still possess one thing which they cannot yet destroy—­the good constitution and the rosy look derived from ancestors whose days were spent in the field under the glorious sunshine and the dews of heaven.  They worry themselves about it in secret and wish they could appear more ladylike—­i.e. thin and white.  Nor can they feel quite so languid and indifferent, and blase as they desire.  Thank Heaven they cannot!  But they have succeeded in obliterating the faintest trace of character, and in suppressing the slightest approach to animation.  They have all got just the same opinions on the same topics—­that is to say, they have none at all; the idea of a laugh has departed.  There is a dead line of uniformity.  But if you are sufficiently intimate to enter into the inner life of the place it will soon be apparent that they either are or wish to appear up to the ‘ways of the world.’