96 STRAY -AW AYS 



known in Ireland as " high ginthry " ; and there is 

 a clean but rigorous third, also largely frequented by 

 the " high ginthry," but the first-class is reserved 

 for some more stately destiny. Danish ladies have 

 very sound ideas on these subjects, as indeed on 

 most subjects connected with money-spending, and 

 many whose rank in their own land is too exalted 

 for ordinary English comprehension, sit in the third- 

 class Damen Koupee among the market women as 

 a matter of course. Having come from a country 

 of grosser conventions, these things were not as yet 

 understood by us, and we did not realise the dis- 

 tinction of our position in the second-class saloon 

 carriage, not even when at Aarhus Station the porters 

 of three different hotels seemed to mistake us for 

 long-expected members of the Royal Family. They 

 were not stridently assertive, they were reverently 

 assiduous — almost devout, but none of their caps 

 bore the name that had been impressed upon us as 

 the one thing desirable or even possible. We said, 

 with the frigid brevity of the old noblesse, " Hotel 

 d'Angleterre." They smiled and burst into oratory 

 that might have been persuasive had it not been in 

 Danish. We rephed, " Hotel d'Angleterre," with the 

 air of those not accustomed to waste words on the 

 canaille. They again perorated in Danish, and it 

 became disastrously apparent that there was no 

 Hotel d'Angleterre, with which discovery we sank 

 into disordered dispute, and the hotel porters miti- 

 gated the situation with smiles just sufficiently 

 intelligent, just sufficiently discreet. Wien, a quarter 

 of an hour later, we climbed four flights of carpetless, 

 well-scrubbed stairs in the Skandinavien Hotel, it 

 was hard to remember what quality it was that 

 had made one smile pre-eminent among three, or 

 whether the choice owed anything to the curve of 



