but conspicuous fact that in America there was no leisure class. The
two ladies came up to London and alighted at Jones's Hotel, where Mrs.
Westgate, who had made on former occasions the most agreeable impression
at this establishment, received an obsequious greeting. Bessie Alden
had felt much excited about coming to England; she had expected the
"associations" would be very charming, that it would be an infinite
pleasure to rest her eyes upon the things she had read about in the
poets and historians. She was very fond of the poets and historians,
of the picturesque, of the past, of retrospect, of mementos and
reverberations of greatness; so that on coming into the English world,
where strangeness and familiarity would go hand in hand, she
was prepared for a multitude of fresh emotions. They began very
promptly--these tender, fluttering sensations; they began with the sight
of the beautiful English landscape, whose dark richness was quickened
and brightened by the season; with the carpeted fields and flowering
hedgerows, as she looked at them from the window of the train; with the
spires of the rural churches peeping above the rook-haunted treetops;
with the oak-studded parks, the ancient homes, the cloudy light,
the speech, the manners, the thousand differences. Mrs. Westgate's
impressions had, of course, much less novelty and keenness, and she gave
but a wandering attention to her sister's ejaculations and rhapsodies.

"You know my enjoyment of England is not so intellectual as Bessie's,"
she said to several of her friends in the course of her visit to this
country. "And yet if it is not intellectual, I can't say it is physical.
I don't think I can quite say what it is, my enjoyment of England." When
once it was settled that the two ladies should come abroad and should
spend a few weeks in England on their way to the Continent, they of
course exchanged a good many allusions to their London acquaintance.

"It will certainly be much nicer having friends there," Bessie Alden had
said one day as she sat on the sunny deck of the steamer at her sister's
feet on a large blue rug.

"Whom do you mean by friends?" Mrs. Westgate asked.

"All those English gentlemen whom you have known and entertained.
Captain Littledale, for instance. And Lord Lambeth and Mr. Beaumont,"
added Bessie Alden.

"Do you expect them to give us a very grand reception?"

Bessie reflected a moment; she was addicted, as we know, to reflection.
"Wel