d be the meaning of this? At last
the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is
impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise
was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I
would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that.
That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it."
I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There
the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies
went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs
likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat,
lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a
great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door--that of my
hostess--saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must
be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that
I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed
defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the
premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by
the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming
supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.

The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or
less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their
entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the
houses to which I am now alluding--some of them great, others relatively
small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present
owners--have been houses which represented for me that old order of
things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family
traditions and associations--elements rooted in the soil of a national
and immemorial past--such were the factors by which the life of these
houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits--many
of them very bad--on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from
rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths
of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses,
except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same
world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from
which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent,
while persons obscure in London would be here in the