Geniality and ingenuousness are alike unknown to the English hostess. It is a very rare thing to meet a charming Englishwoman. Good traits they have in plenty and many sterling qualities which Americans often lack, but magnetism and responsiveness are as a rule not among these qualities.
And I do not yet know whether it is through ignorance or with malice prepense that an English hostess greets you effusively, and then drops you with an air of finality that gives a “lost your last friend” feeling more than anything else in all the world.
This state of things is of course more pronouncedly noticeable at teas than at dinners. At an afternoon reception, the hostility of the hostess is beyond all words. Moreover, at English afternoon teas there are two rules. One is you may not speak to a fellow-guest without an introduction. The other is that no introduction is necessary between guests of the house. One of these rules is always inflexibly enforced at every tea; but the casual guest never knows which one, and so complications ensue.
English hostesses always seem to me very much like that peculiar kind of flowered chintz with which they cover their furniture—the kind that looks like oilcloth, and is very cold and shiny, very beautiful, very slippery, and decidedly uncomfortable.
But in inverse proportion to the conversational unsatisfactoriness of the English women are the entertaining powers of the English men. They are voluntarily delightful. They make an effort (if necessary) to be pleasantly talkative and amusing.
And, notwithstanding the traditional slurs on British humor, the English society man is deliciously humorous, and often as brilliantly witty as our own Americans.
At the dinner I have mentioned above, I was seated next to a somewhat insignificant-looking young man of true English spick-and-spanness, and with a delightful drawl, almost like the one written as dialect in international novels.
Perhaps in consideration of my probable American attitude toward British humor, he good-naturedly amused me with jokes directed against his national peculiarities.
He described graphically an Englishman who was blindly groping about in his brain for a good story which he had heard and stored away there. “Ah, yes,” said the supposed would-be jester; “the man was ill; and he said his physician advised that he should every morning take a cup of coffee and take a walk around the place.”
