It had certainly been very delightful; we had talked all day long; we had wandered, adoring simplicity, on the village green; we had attended an evening service in the church; we had consumed exquisitely cooked meals about an hour before the usual time, because to breakfast at eight and to dine at seven was all part of the pretty game.  I ventured to ask my hostess how she would like to spend six months in her cottage comparatively alone, and she replied with deep conviction, “I should adore it; I would give all I possess to be able to do it.”  “Then it is nothing,” I said, “but a sense of duty that tears you away?” To which she made no answer except to shake her head mournfully, and to give me a penetrating smile.

I cannot help wondering whether the people who talk about the simple life have any idea what it means; I do not think that my fair hostess’s desire for it is altogether a pose.  One who lives, as she does, in the centre of the fashionable world, must inevitably tire of it from time to time.  She meets the same people over and over again, she hears the same stories, the same jokes; she is not exactly an intellectual woman, though she has a taste for books and music; the interest for her, in the world in which she lives, is the changing relations of people, their affinities, their aversions, their loves and hates, their warmth and their coldness.  What underlies the shifting scene, the endless entertainments, the country-house visits, the ebb and flow of society, is really the mystery of sex.  People with not very much to do but to amuse themselves, with no prescribed duties, with few intellectual interests, become preoccupied in what is the great underlying force in the world, the passion of love; the talk that goes on, dull and tiresome as it appears to an outsider, is all charged with the secret influence; it is not what is said that matters; it is what is implied by manner and glance and inflection of tone.  This atmosphere of electrical emotion is, for a good many years of their lives, the native air of these fair and unoccupied women.  Men drift into it and out of it, and it provides for them often no more than a beautiful and thrilling episode; they become interested in sport, in agriculture, in politics, in business; but with women it is different; lovers and husbands, emotional friendships with other women—­these constitute the business of life for a time; and then perhaps the tranquillizing and purer love of children, the troubles and joys of growing boys and girls, come in to fill the mind with a serener and kindlier, though not less passionate an emotion; and so life passes, and age draws near.

It is thus easier for men to lead the simple life than women, because they find it natural to grow absorbed in some definite and tangible occupation; and, after all, the essence of the simple life is that it can be lived in any milieu and under any circumstances.  It does not require a cottage orne and a motor, though these are not inconsistent with it, if only they are natural.