Sargent! You
look--spirited, somehow. Lord!--I wish some of those damned tradesmen at
Wimblehurst could see you."...
They did a lot of week-ending at hotels, and sometimes I went down with
them. We seemed to fall into a vast drifting crowd of social learners. I
don't know whether it is due simply to my changed circumstances, but it
seems to me there have been immensely disproportionate developments of
the hotel-frequenting and restaurant-using population during the last
twenty years. It is not only, I think, that there are crowds of people
who, like we were, are in the economically ascendant phase, but whole
masses of the prosperous section of the population must be altering its
habits, giving up high-tea for dinner and taking to evening dress, using
the week-end hotels as a practise-ground for these new social arts. A
swift and systematic conversion to gentility has been going on, I am
convinced, throughout the whole commercial upper-middle class since I
was twenty-one. Curiously mixed was the personal quality of the
people one saw in these raids.
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