I am not of their monde
at all. I belong to the middle class, and they are of the upper
class. I have a faint desire to indicate that I don't want to cross
the border-line, and that what I desire is the society of
interesting and congenial people, not the society of my social
superior. This is not unworldliness in the least, merely hedonism.
Feudalism runs in the blood of these people, and they feel, not
consciously but quite instinctively, that the confer a benefit by
making my acquaintance. "No doubt but ye are the people," as Job
said, but I do not want to rise in the social scale. It would be
the earthen pot and the brazen pot at best. I am quite content with
my own class, and life is not long enough to change it, and to
learn the habits of another. I have no quarrel with the
aristocracy, and do not in the least wish to level them to the
ground. I am quite prepared to acknowledge them as the upper class.
They are, as a rule, public-spirited, courteous barbarians, with a
sense of honour and responsibility. But they take a great many
things as matters of course which are to me simply alien. I no more
wish to live with them than Wright, my self-respecting gardener,
wishes to live with me--though so deeply rooted are feudal ideas in
the blood of the race, that Wright treats me with a shade of
increased deference because I have been entertaining a party of
Lords and Ladies; and the Vicar's wife said to Maud that she heard
we had been giving a very grand party, and would soon be quite
county people.
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