How I am rambling on, and I wanted to tell you heaps of things!  I shall never get them all into this letter.

When we arrived at this palace it was, as I say, raining, but that did not prevent the marble steps from being decorated with three footmen at equal distances to usher us into the care of a cabinet minister-looking butler, and then through a porphyry hall hung with priceless tapestry and some shockingly glaring imitation Elizabethan oak chairs—­to the library, where our hostess awaited us in a magnificent decollete tea gown, and at least forty thousand pounds’ worth of pearls.  Natalie had the sweetest of frocks possible and was quite simple and nice, and there is not the least difference in her to the daughters of any of our “smart” friends.

The library was a library because they told us so, but there were not any books there, only groups of impossible furniture covered with magnificent brocade, and the finest flowers one ever saw, most perfectly put in huge vases by a really clever gardener; no subtle arrangement of colours, but every blossom the largest there could be in nature.  The tea seemed to get mostly poured out by the servants, and the table was covered with a cloth so encrusted with Venetian lace one’s cup was unsteady on it.  That is one of the most remarkable points here—­I mean America—­as far as I have seen.  The table cloths at every meal are masses of lace, and every sort of wonderful implement in the way of different gold forks and knives for every dish lie by your plate; and such exquisite glass; and some even have old polished tables like Aunt Maria, but instead of the simple slips they have mats and centrepieces and squares of magnificent lace.  Only the very highest cream of the inner elect have plain table cloths and a little silver like we do at home.  And it is always a “party”—­everyone is conscious they are there, and they either assume bad manners or good ones, but nobody is sans gene.  Octavia says it takes as long to be that as to look like a gentleman clean shaven in evening dress.  The rooms are awfully hot, steam heated up to about 75, and it makes your head swim after a while.  There is only the son and a married daughter and husband in the house besides ourselves and two young men.  We should call them bank clerks at home, and that is, I suppose, what they are here; only it is all different.  Every man works just like our middle classes; it is not the least unaristocratic to be a lawyer or a doctor or a wholesale store-keeper, or any profession you can name, so long as it makes you rich.  A man who does nothing is not considered to “amount to anything,” and he generally doesn’t, either!  And I suppose it must be the climate, because directly they get immensely rich, so that the sons need not work, when it gets to the third generation, they often are invalids or weaklings, or have some funny vice or mania, and lots of them die of drink; which shows it is intended in some climates