THE MEANS OF SOJOURN


The secular intensification of the family life makes it possible for
the English to abandon their secular domesticity, when they will,
without apparent detriment to the family life. Formerly the English
family which came up to London for the season or a part of it went into
a house of its own, or, in default of that, went into lodgings, or into
a hotel of a kind happily obsolescent. Such a family now frankly goes
into one of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more
of the Continental and American features than the traits of the old
English hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy
In appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt
to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably
cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It has a table-d'hote
dinner at separate tables and a fair version of the French cuisine. If
it is one of the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dearest,
and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every way than our
cheaper. The supply has created a demand which apparently did not exist
before, and the Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a
hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the American with
being.

In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants in great number and
variety, he has become a diner and luncher at restaurants. Whether he
has been able to exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once
supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle species, cannot
say, but it is evident that at his hotel or his restaurant he dines or
lunches as publicly as ever the American did or does; and he has his
friends to dinner or lunch without pretence of a private dining-room.