drawing-rooms, and after the usual greetings of friends sat down in
their penny chairs for the talk which the present kodak would not have
overheard if it could.

If any one were to ask me how I knew that these beautiful creatures were
of supreme social value, I should be obliged to own that it was largely
an assumption based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch personally in the
matter they might have been women come to see the women who had not
come. Still, if the effects of high breeding are visible, then they were
the sort they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old and young,
had the aristocratic air which is not aggressive, the patrician bearing
which is passive and not active, and which in the English seems
consistent with so much that is human and kindly. There is always the
question whether this sort of game is worth the candle; but that is a
moral consideration which would take me too far from the little scene I
am trying to suggest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the
English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene was the constant
movement of distinguished figures within the sacred close, and up and
down the paths past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The
distinguished figures were apparently not the least molested by the
multiplied and concentrated gazes of the on-lookers, who were, as it
were, outside the window, and of the street. What struck one accustomed
to the heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where any such scene
would be so inexpressibly impossible, was the almost wholly English
personnel of the crowd within and without the sacred close. Here and
there a Continental presence, French or German or Italian, pronounced
its nationality in dress and bearing; one of the many dark subject races
of Great Britain was represented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black
hair and eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various
colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves one was aware of