for men to work.  Octavia says it takes centuries of wielding battle-axes and commanding vassals to give the consciousness of superiority which enables people to be idle without being vicious; but Tom says it is because they don’t hunt and shoot, and go to the bench, and attend to their estates and county business; so instead they have to go crazy over fast motoring or flying machines, or any fad which is uppermost, not having any traditions of how their forefathers passed their time.

Last night there was a dinner party and some such clever men came.  They were great financiers or business men or heads of Trusts.  That means you have a splendid opportunity to speculate, only if anything goes wrong you have to chance all your other associates on the trust turning against you and saying it was all your fault, and then you generally have to commit suicide; but while you are head you can become frightfully rich and respected.  I sat between two of the most successful of different things, and they talked all the time.  They don’t want to hear what you have to say, only to tell you about themselves and their ideas, so it is most interesting.  They are not the least cultivated in literature or art or anything decorative, but full of ideas upon the future evolution of schemes and things; really intensely clever, some of them.  Only the odd part of it is they don’t seem to speculate upon what the marvellous conglomeration of false proportions, unbalance and luxury are going to bring their nation to, if they are not careful.

Mr. Spleist (that is our host’s name) is so kind!  He spoils his wife and Natalie more even than Harry spoils Ermyntrude; and the son-in-law is just the same to his wife.  American husbands fetch and carry and come to heel like trained spaniels, and it is perfectly lovely; everything is so simple.  If you happen to get bored with your husband, or he has a cold in his head, or anything that gets on your nerves, or you suddenly fancy some other man, you have not got all the bother and subterfuge of taking him for a lover and chancing a scandal like in England.  You simply get your husband to let you divorce him, and make him give you heaps of money, and you keep the children if you happen to want them; or—­there is generally only one—­you agree to give that up for an extra million if he fancies it; and then you go off and marry your young man when he is free; because all American men are married, and he will have had to get his wife to divorce him.  But when it is all “through,” then it is comfortable and tidy, only the families get mixed after a while, and people have to be awfully careful not to ask them out to dinner together.  One little girl at a dancing class is reported to have said to another:  “What do you think of your new Papa?  I think he is a mean cuss.  He gave me no candy when he was mine.”

Octavia says, from a morality standard, she does not see there is the least difference to our lovers in England and France, but I do, because here they have the comforting sense of the law finding it all right.  The only tiresome part of it is, it must quite take away the zest of forbidden fruit that European nations get out of such affairs.