Among the married women there are two distinct sets here in the inner cream, the one which Valerie leads, and which has everything like England, and does not go in for any of those wonderful entertainments where elephants do the waiting with their trunks, or you sit in golden swings over a lake while swans swim with the food on trays on their backs—­I am exaggerating, of course, but you know what I mean.  Valerie says all that is in shocking taste, which of course it is.  She never has anything eccentric, only splendid presents at her cotillons, and all the diplomats from Washington come over, and the whole tone of her house is exactly as it is at home, except that many of them are brighter and more amusing than we are.

Then the other set is the “go one better set,”—­that is the best way I can describe it.  If one has a party one week, another must have a finer one the week after, and so on, until thousands and thousands of dollars are spent on flowers, for instance, for one afternoon; and in it nothing is like England.  I believe it must be purely American, or perhaps one ought to say New York.

These two sets meet at Newport, but they won’t speak to any others.  I wish we were going to stay long enough to go there.

When all the dinner party had gone, Octavia and I and one of the other women who are staying in the house, went up with Valerie into her sitting room, and coseyed round the fire; but when Tom and the Vicomte knocked at the door, and wanted to come in, too, and cosey with us, Valerie looked the wee-est trifle shocked, and rather nervously put them off; and she said to me afterwards that the room opened right into her bedroom, and Daniel would have been awfully cross if they had come in!  It is in tiny trifles like this that even Valerie is a fraction provincial.  I suppose she had a Puritan ancestor.  Puritans, as one knows, always have those odd minds that see something bad in everything.

This morning some of them went to church, but I was not in time.  I was so tired I overslept myself and then stayed hours in my bath.  The bath-rooms here are superb.  Certainly the American plumbers are the best in the world.  I can’t imagine what the American women do when they marry foreign noblemen and go home with them to their old castles where they would be expected to wash in a dish.

When I got down I found Gaston pacing the library like a maniac. "Enfin, enfin," he cried, as he kissed my hand.

“Enfin what?” I said, and he told me he had been waiting here for me the whole morning, and they would soon be home from church and he would not get another chance to see me alone.  So I just played with him a little, Mamma!—­and it was too delightful being as provoking as possible and yet perfectly sage.  Harry could not have really objected to a word I said, but all the same it drove Gaston crazy.  I have never had a chance before, you know, because all these years, what with having babies and the fuss and time that takes, and Harry never leaving me for a moment, and glaring at every other man who came near, I did not know how enjoyable a little fencing could be.  And when the rest did come back I only talked to Daniel Latour on purpose to tease Gaston, and I really amused myself.