A servant shows you into a parlour--drawing-room is the proper word now--well carpeted and furnished in the modern style.

She then takes your name--what a world of change is shown in that trifling piece of etiquette! By-and-by, after the proper interval, the ladies enter in morning costume, not a stray curl allowed to wander from its stern bands, nature rigidly repressed, decorum--'Society'-- in every flounce and trimming.

You feel that you have committed a solecism coming on foot, and so carrying the soil on your boots from the fields without into so elegant an apartment Visitors are obviously expected to arrive on wheels, and in correct trim for company.

A remark about the crops falls on barren ground; a question concerning the dairy, ignorantly hazarded, is received with so much _hauteur_ that at last you see such subjects are considered vulgar.

Then a touch of the bell, and decanters of port and sherry are produced and our wine presented to you on an electro salver together with sweet biscuits.
It is the correct thing to sip one glass and eat one biscuit.
The conversation is so insipid, so entirely confined to the merest platitudes, that it becomes absolutely a relief to escape.