that he was anything but a plain, highly-informed gentleman."[1] I felt, too, that an unpretending woman is always safe in her simplicity; and when I alighted and was received by half a dozen servants in white and crimson liveries, and announced through magnificent apartments, I felt no more embarrassment than, as a passably modest woman, I should have done in entering alone a gentleman's house in New-York. Lady L. has an air of birth and breeding, and still much beauty, not merely "the remains" of beauty, for so we always speak of a woman past forty. Lady L. was courteous, not condescending, the least acceptable grace of those who stand on a higher level than their associates, since it betrays the consciousness of elevation. There were several persons in the drawing-room to whom I had before been introduced, and I soon forgot that I was a stranger. The modes of English life are identically our own, and there was nothing to remind me I was not at borne, save more superb apartments, a larger train of servants and in livery, a dinner-service all of plate, and those most covetable luxuries, first-rate pictures and sculpture. I perceived nothing of the studied stillness we have heard alleged of English society.
- ↑ I have heard that an Englishman, on being asked what struck him most in Americans, replied, "their d—d free and easy manners." There was some truth with much coarseness in this. An American, bred in the best society in his own land, does not feel any more than he acknowledges superiority of rank in another. The distinctions of rank are as vague and imperceptible to him as the imaginary lines are to the puzzled child in his first studies on the globe.
