One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by its facility to
those excesses of hospitality which are such a drain on English incomes;
but again that is something of which an outsider can hardly venture to
have an opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern hotel and
restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are pushing the old-fashioned
lodging as well as the old-fashioned hotel out of the general favor, and
have already driven them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a
level where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species.

In the streets neighboring on Piccadilly there are many apartments which
are effectively small hotels, where you pay a certain price for your
rooms, and a certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave this
neighborhood if you want the true lodging where you pay for your
apartment, and order the provisions which are cooked for you, and which
are apportioned to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is not
seriously affected by the reality that your provisions are also
apportioned to the needs of your landlord's family. Even then, the ideal
remains beautiful, and you have an image, somewhat blurred and battered,
of home, such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your landlord is the
butler who has married the cook, your valeting and cooking approach as
nearly perfection as you can hopefully demand.

It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities of the
appointments over which an air of decent reticence is cast, and it will
have been quite useless to try guarding all the points at which you
might be plundered. The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and
perhaps in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging you are
promptly and respectfully personalized; your tastes are consulted, if
not gratified; your minor wants, in which your comfort lies, are
interpreted, and possibly there grows up round you the semblance, which