It has within the last thirty years become customary for the entire English government in India to spend the six hot months of the year in Simla, the town in the Himalayan hills whose singular natural and social topography have become familiar in late years to many English readers through Kipling's Indian tales. The Foreign Office at London recently expended a large sum of money in the erection of suitable buildings there, including a new viceregal residence that is a vast improvement over its predecessor, which was little more than a cottage. It was perched on a precipitous crag, and Lady Dufferin used to compare it to the ark balanced on Mount Ararat, adding that in the rainy season she herself felt like Mrs. Noah.
The villa at Simla and the palaces at Calcutta and at Barrackpore on the river near the capital constitute the trio of viceregal residences in which the Curzons are passing the five years of their life in India. None of them is a home in the meaning we give that word,—a place of privacy and relaxation,—for each has its own degree of state and formality. They live to-day in the glare of the world, with no more seclusion than ever falls either to "the head that wears a crown" or to those to whom it delegates its power. The state that encompasses them does not conceal the personality of either, and both are full of interest.
Marrying a man whose life promised so much, Mary Leiter has undoubtedly been a factor in the early culmination of that promise. She is spoken of throughout India with love and pride, and when Lord Curzon's day comes to pass the government into other hands, it may be that the empire will be placarded with signs, as it was, says a recent historian, when Lord Ripon retired, bearing a legend similar to that they bore then: "We want more Curzons!"
[NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE]
The women who, both at home and abroad, are regarded as the leaders of American society in these last days of the century are or have been, almost without exception, at some time in their career identified with New York. Though there is no city in the United States that fills the central position which Paris holds in reference to all France, and which London occupies, at least socially, in England, the geographical position of New York, to a nation whose progressive spirit inspires it with a keen interest in the doings of the entire world, has given it a leading place, and to the commanding position it holds in the financial life of the American people it undoubtedly owes much of its prominence as a social centre.
Catherine Duer
(Mrs. Clarence Mackay)