That the three
daughters of the Rector of Wychford should be critical of those who
failed to conform to their inherited refinement of life did not strike
him as priggish, because it never struck him for a moment that any other
standard than theirs existed. He felt the same about people who objected
to Catholic ceremonies; their dislike of them did not present itself to
him as arising out of a different religious experience from his own; but
it appeared as a propensity toward unmannerly behaviour, as a kind of
wanton disregard of decency and good taste. He was indeed still at the
age when externals possess not so much an undue importance, but when
they affect a boy as a mould through which the plastic experience of his
youth is passed and whence it emerges to harden slowly to the ultimate
form of the individual. In the case of Mark there was the revulsion from
the arid ugliness of Haverton House and the ambition to make up for
those years of beauty withheld, both of which urged him on to take the
utmost advantage of this opportunity to expose the blank surface of
those years to the fine etching of the present. Miriam at home, the
Greys at Wychford, and in some ways most of all Richard Ford at
Fairfield gave him in a few months the poise he would have received more
gradually from a public school education.
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