Victorians and Confucians alike had learned new uses for the foyer, anteroom, 
or whatever it was called, and for the
old etiquette of visiting cards. For that matter, all tribes with 
sophistication in nanotech understood that visitors had to be carefully 
examined before they could be admitted into one's inner sanctum, and that such 
examination, carried out by thousands of assiduous reconnaissance mites, took 
time. So elaborate waiting-room etiquette had flourished, and sophisticated 
people all over the world understood that when they called upon someone, even a 
close friend, they could expect to spend some time sipping tea and perusing 
magazines in a front room infested with unobtrusive surveillance equipment.