re like that. Sargent! You
look--spirited, somehow. Lord!--I wish some of those damned tradesmen at
Wimblehurst could see you."...

They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with
them. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners. I
don't know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but it
seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of
the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the last
twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people
who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole
masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its
habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using
the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. A
swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am
convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I
was twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the
people one saw in these raids. There were conscientiously refined
and low-voiced people reeking with proud bashfulness; there were
aggressively smart people using pet diminutives for each other loudly
and seeking fresh occasions for brilliant rudeness; there were awkward
husbands and wives quarrelling furtively about their manners and ill
at ease under the eye of the winter; cheerfully amiable and often
discrepant couples with a disposition to inconspicuous corners, and the
jolly sort, affecting an unaffected ease; plump happy ladies who laughed
too loud, and gentlemen in evening dress who subsequently "got their
pipes." And nobody, you knew, was anybody, however expensively they
dressed and whatever rooms they took.

I look back now with a curious remoteness of spirit to those crowded
dining-rooms with their dispersed tables and their inevitable red-shaded
lights and the unsympathetic, unskillful waiters, and the choice of
"Thig or Glear, Sir?" I've not dined in that way, in that sort of place,
now for five years--it must be quite five years, so specialised and
narrow is my life becoming.

My uncle's earlier motor-car phases work in with these associations,
and there stands out a little bright vignette of the hall of the
Magnificent, Bexhill-on-Sea, and people dressed for dinner and sitting
about amidst the scarlet furniture--satin and white-enameled woodwork
until the gong should gather