they
are tired of running them, tired of the plumber, tired of the housemaid.
There are thousands of families in London, quite well-to-do, who prefer
to live in boarding houses; they hate the boarding house, but they hate
it less than home. They feel less tied; they have less furniture; they
like to feel that their furniture is in store where they can forget all
about it. They have lost part of their old love for Aunt Maria's magenta
curtains--the home idea has become less significant to them. And this
applies also to hotels. The increase of hotels in London, in every
provincial city, all over the world, is not entirely explained by the
traveler, though, by the way, the increase in traveling is a sign of the
decay of the home. The old idea, "You've got a good home and you've got
to stay there," suffers whenever a member of the home leaves it for any
reason other than the virtuous pursuit of his business. All over the
center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels
have risen--the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the
Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in
some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An
enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park; another is projected
at Hyde Park Corner; the Strand Palace is open, and at the Regent Palace
there are, I understand, fourteen hundred bedrooms. The position is that
a proportion of London's population is beginning to live in these hotels
without servants of their own, without furniture of their own, without
houses of their own. A more detached, a freer spirit is invading them,
and a desire to get all they can out of life while they can, instead of
solemnly worshiping the Englishman's castle.

It does not come easily, and it does not come quickly. During the last
twenty-five years most of the blocks of flats to be found in London have
risen, with their villainously convenient lifts for passengers and
their new-fangled lifts for dust bins and coal, with their electricity
and their white paint, and other signs of emancipation. They were not
popular when they came, and they are disliked by the older generation;
it is still a little vicious to live in a West End flat. And when the
younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you
can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one
should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enou