“After all, you can say what you like, Theodore, but in point of fact we belong to just the same class as Bertram Railing. Are you sure that Winnie is not merely sinking to our proper level? It’s a tendency with families like ours, that have come up in the world; and with most of us, to keep up our nobility is just swimming against the stream.”
“You’re mixing your , Sophia, and I haven’t an idea what you mean.”
“Well, in our heart of hearts we’re , we’re bourgeois. But I suspect it’s just the same with others as it is with us. In the last fifty years so many tinkers, tailors, and spectacle-makers have pitchforked themselves into the upper classes; and very few of them are quite at home. Some are continually on the alert to uphold their dignity, trying to hide by the stupid of a bogus in Burke, the grandfather who was a country attorney, or a plate-layer, or a . Some, with the energy still in them of all those ancestors who were honest shopkeepers or artisans, throw themselves from sheer into every kind of dissipation.”
“You talk like a tub-thumper,” said Canon Spratte, with .
Lady Sophia her shoulders.
“And after all, however much they struggle, the majority, sooner or later, sink back into the ranks of the middle classes. And, once there, with what a comfortable ease they wallow!”
“Facilis descensus Averni,” he murmured.
“Lord Stonehenge can make earldoms and baronies galore, but what’s the good when the instincts of these new noblemen, their habits and and , are bourgeois to the very !”
Lady Sophia looked at her brother for an indignant denial of these statements, but to her surprise he answered nothing. He was very thoughtful.
“Don’t you know shoals of them?” she said. “Young men who would make quite passable doctors or fairly honest lawyers, and who wear their honours like clothes several sizes too large for them? They through life aimlessly, like fish out of water. Look at Sir Peter Mason, whose father was President of some medical body at the , and managed with difficulty to scrape up the needful thirty thousand pounds to accept a baronetcy. Peter was then a medical student whose ambition it was to buy a little practice in the country and marry his cousin Bertha. Well, now he’s a baronet and Bertha thinks it bad form that he should drive about in a dog-cart to see patients at five shillings a visit. So they live in Essex because it’s cheap, and try to keep up their dignity on a thousand a year, and they’re desperately bored. Have you never met rather girls who’ve spent their lives in Bayswater or in some small dull terrace at South Kensington, till their father in the see-saw of politics was made a peer? How clumsily they bear their twopenny titles, how self-consciously! And with what relief they marry some obscure young man in the City!”
Canon Spratte looked at his sister for a moment, and when he answered, it was only by a visible effort that his voice remained firm.
“Sophia, if Winnie marries beneath her it will break my heart.”
“Yes, you’re the other sort of nouvelle noblesse, Theodore: you’re the sort that’s always struggling to get on equal terms with the old.”
“Sophia, Sophia!”
“What do you suppose Lady Wroxham said when told her he wanted to marry Winnie?”
“She’s a charming woman and she has a deeply religious spirit, Sophia.”
“Yes, but all the same I have an idea that she raised those thin of hers and in that quiet, voice, asked: ‘Winnie Spratte, Harry? Do you think the Sprattes are quite up to your form?’ ”
“I should think it extremely if she said anything of the sort,” retorted the Canon, with all his old fire.
The conversation dropped, but he could not help it if some of these observations . Lionel, on whom depended the future of the stock, proposed to marry a brewer’s daughter, and Winnie was engaged to a man of no family. It looked indeed as though his children were sinking back into the ranks whence with so much trouble his father had emerged. Nor did the second Earl his scorn for the family honours. His coronet, with the strawberry leaves and the lifted pearls, he kicked hither and , verbally, like a football; and the ermine cloak was a rag which never ceased to excite his derision.
“I’m the only member of the family who has a proper sense of his dignity,” sighed the Canon.
But when he heard that Winnie, on her return from Peckham Rye, had gone to her room with a headache, he chased away these gloomy thoughts. Even affection could not prevent him from rubbing his hands with satisfaction.
“I thought she wouldn’t be very well after a visit to Mr. Railing’s mamma,” he said.
When she entered the drawing-room he went towards her with outstretched hands.
“Ah, my love, I see you’ve returned safely from the wilds of Peckham. I hope you encountered no beasts in those unfrequented parts.”
Winnie, with a little of , sank into a chair. Her head was aching still and her eyes were red with many tears. Canon Spratte assumed his most affable manner. His voice was a of , and only in a note here and there was perceptible a suspicion of .
“I hope you enjoyed yourself, my pet. You know the only wish I have in the world is to make you happy. And did your mother-in-law take you to her capacious ?”
“She was very kind, father.”
“I imagine that she was not exactly polished?”
“I didn’t expect her to be,” answered Winnie, in so dejected a tone that it would have melted the heart of any one less than Theodore Spratte.
“But I suppose you didn’t really mind that much, did you? True is such a beautiful thing, and in this world, ! so rare.”
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