London, she imposed but two guiding conditions on his choice for
her of a home in town.

"I want the biggest house on the most fashionable street," she is said
to have said. The result was that Mr. Vanderbilt purchased Sunderland
House, in Curzon Street, and there the duchess is fittingly installed.

There the most sumptuous decorating and furnishing has been done, and
when she entertains, her dinners will be the most splendid and her
balls the largest and most luxurious of the season, for whatever the
duchess does is done in almost regal style.

Eventually no London hostess can or will outshine her, and yet this
first among the American duchesses is not very socially inclined. She
prefers the country life and Blenheim to the best that London can give
her, and this taste is to a great measure shared by many of our
American peeresses and guests.

The Countess of Orford, Lady Monson, the Countess of Donoughmore, Mrs.
Spender Clay, Lady Charles Ross and Mrs. Langhorne Shaw, for example,
find English country life pre-eminently to their taste, and all but
avoid the town, save in the very height of the season.

Lady Orford--who was Miss Corbin--lives at Waborne Hall, her husband's
magnificent Georgian place in Norfolk. There she gives shooting
parties, from there she goes with her husband and pretty young
daughter to fish in Scotland and Norway, and the chief interest that
brings her up to London is her taste for music and the opera, which,
she declares, is the only pleasure that one cannot gratify out of
town.

Next after music, sport--fishing most especially--engages her
particular interest. Though she rarely goes out with the guns, her
husband declares she is a capital shot, and that she could and would
ride to hounds with the most daring of our fox-hunting peeresses, if
Norfolk was a hunting shire.

Prominent, however, among the hunting set is the handsome Countess of
Donoughmore, whose father, the American millionaire Grace, owns Battle
Abbey, and has made England his home for many years. His slender,
pretty daughter, who was Miss Eleana Grace before she married an Irish
earl, rode to hounds from her days of floating locks and short skirts.

Now, as a fair and fashionable peeress, she hunts Ireland and England
both with all the zest and skill of a native-born Irish woman. Her
keenest American competitor, in the art of hard cross-country riding,
is a young and beautiful Virginian, Mrs. Langhorne-Shaw, who comes