to a life of complete seclusion the interests they have in common with their English visitors must necessarily be very few.  On the other hand, it is not surprising that Englishmen, knowing the views that many Indian men entertain with regard to the position of women, do not care to encourage them to visit their own houses on a footing of intimacy that would necessarily bring them into more or less familiar contact with their English wives and sisters and daughters.  There is very much to admire in the family relations, and especially in the filial relations, that exist in an Indian home, whether Hindu or Mahomedan, but it is idle to pretend that Indian ideas with regard to the relations between the sexes are the same as ours.  In these circumstances any social fusion between even the better classes of the two races seems to be for the present out of the question.

Very sincere and creditable efforts are now, it is true, being made on both sides to diminish the gulf that divides English and Indian society, and I have been at various gatherings which were attended by Englishmen and Englishwomen and by Indians, among whom there was sometimes even a sprinkling of Indian ladies.  But the English host and hostess invariably found it difficult to prevent their Indian guests forming groups of their own, and each group seemed to be as reluctant to mingle with other Indian groups of a different class or caste as with their English fellow-guests.  Indian society has been for centuries split up by race and caste and creed distinctions into so many watertight compartments that it does not care for the Western forms of social intercourse, which tend to ignore those distinctions.  It is Indians themselves who regard us, much more than we regard ourselves, as a separate caste.  Moreover, for the ordinary and somewhat desultory conversation which plays so large a part in Western sociability the Indian has very little understanding.  He always imagines that conversation must have some definite purpose, and though he has far, more than most English men, the gift of ready and courteous speech, and often will talk for a long time both discursively and pleasantly, it is almost always as a preliminary to the introduction of some particular topic in which his personal interests are more or less directly involved.  A question which causes a good deal of soreness is the rigid exclusion of Indians from many Anglo-Indian clubs.  But though a little more elasticity as to the entertainment of Indian “guests” might reasonably be conceded to Indian susceptibilities, a club is after all just as much as his house an Englishman’s castle, and it is only in India that any one would venture to suggest that a club should not settle its rules of membership as it thinks fit.  In the large cities at least there should, however, be room for clubs which, like the Calcutta Club at Calcutta, serve the very useful purpose of bringing together by mutual consent the higher classes of Indians and