Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/90

Rh that he was anything but a plain, highly-informed gentleman." I felt, too, that an unpretending woman is always safe in her simplicity; and when I alighted and was received by half a dozen servants in white and crimson liveries, and announced through magnificent apartments, I felt no more embarrassment than, as a passably modest woman, I should have done in entering alone a gentleman's house in New-York. Lady L. has an air of birth and breeding, and still much beauty, not merely "the remains" of beauty, for so we always speak of a woman past forty. Lady L. was courteous, not condescending, the least acceptable grace of those who stand on a higher level than their associates, since it betrays the consciousness of elevation. There were several persons in the drawing-room to whom I had before been introduced, and I soon forgot that I was a stranger. The modes of English life are identically our own, and there was nothing to remind me I was not at borne, save more superb apartments, a larger train of servants and in livery, a dinner-service all of plate, and those most covetable luxuries, first-rate pictures and sculpture. I perceived nothing of the studied stillness we have heard alleged of English society.