After a long, but by no means tedious, wait there appeared on the other side of the platform a toy railroad train, so amateurish that it looked like one drawn by a child on a slate.
We were put into a box-stall, and locked in. The ridiculous little contraption bobbled along its track, and finally stopped in the middle of a beautiful landscape, and we jumped out to become part of it.
The barouche of our hostess awaited us, with still life in the shape of liveried attendants. A huge wagon awaited the luggage, which had mysteriously dumped itself out of the train, and we were whisked away to the Garden Party.
Partly to be polite, and partly because I couldn’t help it, I remarked on the marvellous beauty of the country.
The Wag O’ The World enthusiastically agreed with me. “But, Emily,” he said, “if you could only see this same country in the spring! These lanes are walled on either side with the pink bloom of the may,—and the wild flowers . . .”
Tears stood in the blue eyes of the Wag, at the mere thought of spring in Kent, and I realized at last why English poets have sometimes written poems about Spring.
We passed through the village, one of those tiny hamlets which acquire merit only by age and local tradition. The Happy Villagers stared at us with just the correct degree of bucolic curiosity, and we rolled on through the lodge gates, and along the winding, beautiful avenue to the house. In every direction stretched wide lawns of perfect grass, that probably acquired its uppish look when William the Conqueror trod it.
We were met by no humanity of our own stamp, but were shown to our room by benevolent-minded factotums, and gently advised to prepare for the Garden Party.
With the exception of entertainments of a public nature, I have never seen so beautiful and elaborate an affair. The guests, to the number of two hundred, came from all the country round; some in equipages dripping with ancestral glory, and some in motor-cars reeking with modern wealth.
The women’s costumes were of themselves a study. The English woman’s dress often inclines to the bizarre; and at a garden fête she lets herself loose in radiant absurdities, which she wears with the absolute self-satisfaction born of the knowledge that in the matter of feminine adornment England is the land of the free and home of the brave.