People We Love To Stay With

We enjoy staying with certain people usually for one of two reasons. First, because they have wonderful, luxurious houses, filled with amusing people; and visiting them is a period crammed with continuous and delightful experience, even though such a visit has little that suggests any personal intercourse or friendship with one's hostess. The other reason we love to visit a certain house is, on the contrary, entirely personal to the host or hostess. We love the house because we love its owner. Nowhere do we feel so much at home, and though it may have none of the imposing magnificence of the great house, it is often far more charming.

Five flunkeys can not do more towards a guest's comfort than to take his hat and stick and to show him the way to the drawing-room. A very smart young New Yorker who is also something of a wag, says that when going to a very magnificent house, he always tries to wear sufficient articles so that he shall have one to bestow upon each footman. Some one saw him, upon entering a palace that is a counterpart of the Worldlys, ' quite solemnly hand his hat to the first footman, his stick to the second, his coat to the third, his muffler to the fourth, his gloves to the fifth, and his name to the sixth, as he entered the drawing-room. Needless to say he did this as a matter of pure amusement to himself. Of course six men servants, or more, do add to the impressiveness of a house that is a palace and are a fitting part of the picture. And yet a neat maid servant at the door can divest a guest of his hat and coat, and lead the way to the sitting-room, with equal facility.

Having several times mentioned Golden Hall, the palatial country house of the Gildings, suppose we join the guests and see what the last word in luxury and lavish hospitality is.

Golden Hall is not an imaginary place, except in name. It exists within a hundred miles of New York. The house is a palace, the grounds are a park. There is not only a long wing of magnificent guest rooms in the house, occupied by young girls or important older people, but there is also a guest annex, a separate building designed and run like the most luxurious country club. The second floor has nothing but bedrooms, with bath for each. The third floor has bachelor rooms, and rooms for visiting valets. Visiting maids are put in a separate third floor wing. On the ground floor there is a small breakfast room; a large living-room filled with books, magazines, a billiard and pool table; beyond the living-room is a fully equipped gymnasium; and beyond that a huge, white marble, glass-walled natatorium. The swimming pool is fifty feet by one hundred; on three sides is just a narrow shelf-like walkway, but the fourth is wide and is furnished as a room with lounging chairs upholstered in white oilcloth. Opening out of this are perfectly equipped Turkish and Russian baths in charge of the best Swedish masseur and masseuse procurable.

In the same building are two squash courts, a racquet court, a court tennis court, and a bowling alley. But the feature of the guest building is a glass-roofed and enclosed riding ring—not big enough for games of polo, but big enough for practise in winter, —built along one entire side of it.

The stables are full of polo ponies and hunters, the garage full of cars, the boathouse has every sort of boat—sailboats, naphtha launches, a motor boat and even a shell. Every amusement is open-heartedly offered, in fact, especially devised for the guests.

At the main house there is a ballroom with a stage at one end. An orchestra plays every night. New moving pictures are shown and vaudeville talent is imported from New York. This is the extreme of luxury in entertaining. As Mrs. Toplofty said at the end of a bewilderingly lavish party: " How are any of us ever going to amuse any one after this? I feel like doing my guest rooms up in moth balls."

No one, however, has discovered that invitations to Mrs. Toplofty's are any less welcome. Besides, excitement-loving youth and exercise-devotees were never favored guests at the Hudson Manor anyway.