Old Sir Douglas

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Kenneth, ' for he sets up to know more of these people in two days, than those who have sat, ?as we have, ?for two months, within hail of Lady Charlotte's one ringlet almost every evening.' CHAPTER VI. HOW ACQUAINTANCE EIPENS. Almost every evening ! It is astonishing how rapidly intimacy progresses in country-houses, sea-side gatherings, and the small society of compatriots in a foreign town. If you know each other at all, it is almost impossible not to be what is called ' intimate;' even though that degree of familiarity may lessen, or cease altogether, when the cireumstances which produce it are altered; and when persons who were ' great friends' at Rome, Naples, or Florence, choose to drop into being civil acquaintances, after they once more carelessly congregate with the herding swarms of London. Lady Charlotte and her daughter Gertrude were the chief stars at Naples of many a pic-nic party and ball. Not that Gertrude was a great beauty, or her mother a wise woman, as we have seen; but because they were among the few well-connected English then in Naples; and the ' set, '?as Lady Charlotte called it, ?with the addition of what was best of the ' foreign set, ' mingled and met nearly every day in pursuit of the same aim?pleasure. The English are said to hold aloof from each other abroad; and there is a humorous passage at the opening of Sterne's ' Sentimental Journey, ' where he represents himself as meeting with a gentlemanlike and conversible person, of whose chance companionship he was about to avail himself, but, finding he was a compatriot, he retired to his own room. Whatever may have been the case in Sterne's time, it is certain that the disposition now is rather the reverse. And though we hear of ladies in India, and officers' wives in regiments on foreign s.