ir natural element.
Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had
at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such
country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong
resemblance to Catholic society in London.

But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar
antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a
London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a
fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man,
gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word
with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody
else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an
hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like
chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context.
Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one
moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one
of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of
interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but
there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward.
What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of
Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is
present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at
happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become
new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?

Further, let me observe this--I have here an eye on my own case in
particular--that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life,
the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact--the very
important fact--that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom
as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his
own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work
as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in
hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very
far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a
disturbance.

Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own
acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a
description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as
many of such houses as most people; but no one p