an idle day. On these off days in September the hostess often
gives a garden-party, or takes her guests to one given by a neighbour at
some few miles distant; or she holds a stall at a bazaar and persuades
her guests to assist her in disposing of her stock; or she induces her
party to accompany her to some flower-show in which she takes a local
interest; or the host and one or two of the best shots start early after
breakfast to shoot with a neighbour, and the remainder of the guests
drive over to a picturesque ruin, where they picnic, and return home in
time for the eight-o'clock dinner. If the owner of a mansion has a coach
the whole party is conveyed on it, otherwise the motor-cars are brought
into requisition, while saddle horses are provided for those who care
to ride. A country-house party occasionally resolves itself into two or
more cliques, as far as the ladies are concerned; gentlemen, as a rule,
are not much given to this sort of thing. On the first evening, as soon
as the ladies have left the dining-room for the drawing-room, these
little cliques are tacitly formed, and continue unbroken until the close
of the visit. There are many reasons which call these cliques into
existence--old intimacies revived, new acquaintanceships to be
strengthened, unwelcome acquaintanceships to be avoided, and so on.
These cliques are by no means agreeable to the hostess, indeed, quite
the contrary--but she is powerless to prevent their being formed, and
she is herself sometimes drawn into one or other of them, and sometimes
altogether excluded from them. Any one who is at all conversant with
country-house visiting is aware how thoroughly the influence of the
clique pervades the atmosphere of the drawing-room; and yet, perhaps, at
country-house parties more friendships are formed and intimacies
cemented than at any other gatherings.

* * * * *

=The evening amusements= at country-house parties vary very much
according to the proclivities of the hostess or those of her daughters.
At some houses dancing is the order of things for a couple of hours or
so after dinner, but this mode of spending the evening does not always
commend itself to the gentlemen, who, after a long day's walking through
wet turnips and over heavy ploughed land, or a hard day's riding over
stiff fences, rather incline towards the _dolce far niente_ of a
luxurious armchair than to the pleasures of the mazy valse, and are
propor