be turned loose in the drawing-room, or must be told
privately to each member of the party, for fear of shocking
public opinion; but one's host and hostess are a sort of
human hinterland that one never has the time to explore.

There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who
farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should
never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long
afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer's widow and set up as
a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully
immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent
player, but still, it showed imagination. His wife was
really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in
the house who understood how to manage the cook's temper, and
now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. Still,
that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her
cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.

I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they
seldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with their
guests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bit
better, they leave off knowing you altogether. There was
RATHER a breath of winter in the air when I left those
Dorset-shire people. You see, they had asked me down to
shoot, and I'm not particularly immense at that sort of
thing. There's such a deadly sameness about partridges; when
you've missed one, you've missed the lot--at least, that's
been my experience. And they tried to rag me in the smoking-
room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort
of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly