LETTER XX
Monk's Folly, 18th September
Darling Elizabeth:
At Home
Home once more! I never knew how much I had missed it till I got back. I wonder how I ever left it, everything is so comfortable and refined. I feel quite clean again—I mean morally clean, and that's a sensation that we in our station and particular set get so seldom. I believe the return to an English home is a moral douche. I feel virtuous; I went to hear Mr. Frame preach in the morning and almost went again this evening. I half made up my mind to put aside Paquin and make a guy of myself, I felt so good; but a glimpse of Lady Beatrice in church this morning with a Taunton milliner's dream on her back, put me off, and as soon as I had taken a tiny blue pill and driven the hypochondria of Lucerne dissipation away, I shall be my old self again—the self you know, Elizabeth, all Paquin and Henry Arthur Jones.
Tipping
What an awful imposition tipping is. Servants won't look at small change now-a-days, and when I gave the boy who works the lift five shillings, his "Thank you" sounded just like "Damn you." Mrs. Chevington, who came over this afternoon, told me of an experience she had the last time she was in town, but I am sure I should never have had the courage to do what she did. She was only three days in some hotel in the West End; she had tipped the chamber-maid, the man in the lift, the maître d'hôtel, the waiter, and sent a half-sovereign in to the cook, and was waiting for a hansom, when up rushed a man she had never seen before to help her into it. He took off his hat and was very polite; hotel-porter was written all over him, and she supposed she ought to tip him, but said her gorge rose at it, as he had never done anything for her. However, she put a half-crown in his hat, and he never said "Thank you," which made her so savage that she took it back again. The result was that at Paddington the cabman thought she was stingy, and he was so abusive that she had to call a policeman, and compel the man to take the right fare.
But then Mrs. Chevington is masterful, and doesn't mind attracting a crowd and being insulted, while I should have fainted with mortification. I am sending you a cheque expressly for tips, for I know that in country houses they are even more grasping than in hotels. I wish Royalty would stop it, for I don't think any other means will ever avail.
Uneventful Things