sed your pleasure.
But the next best thing for you is to read it now." I thanked her, and
said that I should like to do so. I think that she would have gone on to
recommend a perusal of the works of William Shakespeare to me in
connection with my visit to Stratford on Avon, although she looked at me
in a puzzled way once or twice. But my companion, although I saw he was
amused at something in her talk, marred whatever hopes I had of further
instruction by breaking in with some remark upon the politics of
Warwickshire. She rose to his fly like a trout on a hazy day, and in a
minute or two she had forgotten my existence in her discussion with him
of a topic which plainly was to her of far more interest than all the
Scotts that could have dwelt in Kenilworth, and all the Shakespeares
that could have stood in Stratford. He was a Birmingham magnate, and
knew everything that was going on in the country; but she was his equal
in information, and it seemed to me his superior in political craft. To
every suggestion of his she made some reply that showed that the
question was not new to her. She knew all the ins and outs of the
politics of the county: who could be expected to support this measure,
who was sure to oppose that. She knew all about the manufacturing
interests of Birmingham: who had retired from active management; who was
coming in; what money had been taken out of this establishment, what
changes had taken place in the other, and had an opinion as to what
effect this was going to have upon Parliament. I never heard the
beginning of such political talk from a woman in America, even from one
whose husband was in politics. The train stopped; her maid appeared, and
she bade us courteously good-by, with the puzzled look in her eye as it
rested upon the fellow passenger to whom she had recommended the perusal
of "Kenilworth"; and then my companion told me, what indeed I had been
sure of all along, that she was a member of the governing class.

A few days before, I had observed in Oxford, where a local election was
impending, small posters addressed to "The Burgesses," and these
invariably began "_Ladies_ and Gentlemen," a form of "campaign
document" as foreign to us as it would be to peoples subject to the
Salique law--than which worse laws have long prevailed in many
countries.

Not only in politics but in business women appear much more prominently
than they do in "America." If they do not keep hotels, which they
somet