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Bethune's five-o'clock teas, and he was always considered an acquisition. He was also very fond of going to them; for under no circumstances was Mrs. Bethune so charming. To see her in this hour of perfect relaxation was to understand how great and beautiful is the art of idleness.
There, in the late afternoon of that day, came one of the Prussian royal family and paid the mistress of the house an informal friendly visit, taking "five-o'clock tea" in the English fashion, and with a retinue of two or three attendants making the tour of the close-shaven lawns, the firm gravelled walks and the broad and frequent flights of steps that led from one terraced flower-garden to another.
Our visits were always long, as most of the châteaux were at a certain distance, and we were obliged to stay an hour and a half, sometimes longer, to rest the horses. It was before the days of five-o'clock tea. A tray was brought in with sweet wine (Malaga or Vin de Chypre) and cakes (ladies'-fingers) which evidently had figured often before on similar occasions. Conversation languished sometimes, though Mme. A. was wonderful, talking so easily about everything. In the smaller places, when people rarely went to Paris, it ran always in the same grooves the woods, the hunting (very good in the Villers-Cotterets forest), the schoolmaster (so difficult to get proper books for the children to read), the curé, and all local gossip, and as much about the iniquities of the republic as could be said before the wife of a republican senator. Wherever we went, even to the largest châteaux, where the family went to Paris for the season, the talk was almost entirely confined to France and French interests. Books, politics, music, people, nothing existed apparently au-del
Americans, even though we are as hospitable as any nation on earth, might well take a lesson from the Russians in regard to the respect they pay to a letter of introduction. The English send word when you can be received, and you pay each other frosty formal calls, and then are asked to five-o'clock tea or some other wildly exciting function of similar importance.
"With them it is breakfast, luncheon, dinner, five-o'clock tea, and supper, with a great many other meals between times that would not be wholesome for House Children. So you can see for yourselves that we may well call the bird a fellow-being." "Yes," said Rap, his eyes beaming as if he had something to tell, "some birds work as hard as mother does.
For a busy woman of fashion nothing can be more conveniently timed than a matin,e, which begins at two and ends at four or half past. It does not interfere with a five-o'clock tea or a drive in the park, nor unfit her for a dinner or an evening entertainment.
Very small it was, consisting only of an inn, a house, half cottage and half shop, and a few red-tiled cottages wherein the bargemen lived, when they were at home, which was seldom. In the bright sunlight, the blue sky overhead and the shining river in the foreground, it formed a pretty enough picture. In the little shop parlour now sat a woman and her husband, at their five-o'clock tea.
She tells me that once, being shipwrecked, she grasped her tea-caddy, her alcohol-stove, and a large bottle of alcohol, and prepared for the worst. They drifted four days on a raft, and she made five-o'clock tea every day, to the great encouragement of the unfortunates.
The five-o'clock milk-train took passengers in to business every morning, and the eight-o'clock accommodation brought them home again every evening; moreover, the noon freight stopped at Elmdale to take up passengers every other Wednesday, and it was the practice of every other train to whistle and to slack up in speed to thirty miles an hour while passing through this promising suburb.
"This wine has been seven times round the world," he said, "and the only time for drinking it is five-o'clock tea, that is, if you understand what good living means." I asked simply for a cup of tea, which I found to be peculiarly good, partly because of the cream which accompanied it. I then went up-stairs to take a constitutional walk with Mr Crosstrees on the deck.
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