Given this and a number of other peculiarities, it seems curious that a certain class of Americans should be so anxious to live in England. What is it tempts them? It cannot be the climate, for that is vile; nor the city of London, for it is one of the ugliest in existence; nor their "cuisine"--for although we are not good cooks ourselves, we know what good food is and could give Britons points. Neither can it be art, nor the opera,--one finds both better at home or on the Continent than in England. So it must be society, and here one's wonder deepens!
When I hear friends just back from a stay over there enlarging on the charms of "country life," or a London "season," I look attentively to see if they are in earnest, so incomparably dull have I always found English house parties or town entertainments. At least that side of society which the climbing stranger mostly affects. Other circles are charming, if a bit slow, and the "Bohemia" and semi-Bohemia of London have a delicate flavor of their own.
County society, that ideal life so attractive to American readers of British novels, is, taken on the whole, the most insipid existence conceivable.
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