_must be_--a lady, a charming English lady. There was, it seemed to me, no
fatuity in believing that on this rainy Sunday afternoon it would not
please her to be told that two gentlemen had walked across the country to
her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a card. Therefore,
when, before we had gone many yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us,
I felt how just my sentiment of the situation had been. Of course we went
back, and I carried my muddy shoes into the drawing-room--just the
drawing-room I had imagined--where I found--I will not say just the lady I
had imagined, but--a lady even more charming. Indeed, there were two
ladies, one of whom was staying in the house. In whatever company you find
yourself in England, you may always be sure that some one present is
"staying." I seldom hear this participle now-a-days without remembering an
observation made to me in France by a lady who had seen much of English
manners: "Ah, that dreadful word _staying!_ I think we are so happy in
France not to be able to translate it--not to have any word that answers to
it." The large windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked away over the
river to the blurred and blotted hills, where the rain was drizzling and
drifting. It was very quiet: there was an air of leisure. If one wanted to
do something here, there was evidently plenty of time--and indeed of every
other appliance--to do it. The two ladies talked about "town:" that is what
people talk about in the country. If I were disposed I might represent them
as talking about it with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked
myself how it was possible that one should live in this charming place and
trouble one's head about what was going on in London in July. Then we had
excellent tea.

I have narrated this trifling incident because there seemed to be some
connection between it and what I was going to say about the stranger's
sense of country life being the normal, natural, typical life of the
English. In America, however comfortably people may live in the country,
there is always, relatively speaking, an air of picnicking about their
establishments. Their habitations, their arrangements, their appointments,
are more or less provisional. They dine at different hours from their city
hours; they wear different clothing; they spend all their time out of
doors. The English, on the other hand, live according to the same system in
Devonshire and in Mayfair--with the