enever I tried to secure it for my own
perusal it had disappeared. I heard someone casually say, "Everybody in
the house is reading it." I could not but wonder why. I managed to
secure it at last, and set myself to find out the reason. It did not
take long to find. Hare, a year before, had been staying in that very
house--a house famous for the material perfection of its equipments.
"The servants here," so Hare wrote and printed, "are notoriously more
pampered than those in any other house in England, and their insolence
and arrogance is proportionate to the luxury in which they live." On
another occasion he recorded a visit to Castle ----, the family name of
the owners being C----. He summed up his gratitude to his entertainers
in the following pithy sentence, "Except dear Lady ----, I never could
stand the C----s." Another of his entries was as follows. Having
migrated from the Stanhopes' at Chevening to a neighboring old house in
Kent, he wrote, "What a comfort it is, after staying with people who are
too clever, to find oneself with people who are all refreshingly
stupid!" If it were not for the danger of lapsing into indiscretions
like these--indiscretions of which Hare seemed altogether
unconscious--interesting anecdotes might be here indefinitely
multiplied.

Even so, however, such anecdotes, no matter who recorded them, would be
simply so many jottings which owed their continuity to the fact that,
like the stones of a necklace, they happened to be strung on the thread
of a single writer's experiences, and in no two cases would this thread
be altogether the same. My own experiences of the social life of London,
as I knew it in my earlier days, will perhaps best be described in more
general terms. In such terms, then, let me speak of it as, foreshortened
by time, it now presents itself to my memory.

For me, in my earlier years, the routine of a London day was practically
much as follows. A morning of note-writing--of accepting or refusing
invitations--was succeeded by a stroll with some companion among the
company--the gay and animated company--which before the hour of luncheon
at that time thronged the park. Then, more often than not, came a
luncheon at two o'clock, to which many of the guests had been bidden a
moment ago as the result of some chance meeting. A garden party, such as
those which took place at Sion House or at Osterly, would occupy now and
again the rest of an afternoon; but the principal busines