"But I did! I knew exactly what he meant and many a bitter hour it had cost me when I was infatuated with the convent-bred miss who had trotted after him as soon as he had whistled 'come!' Breeding! The cant of it. The silly dishonesty of it! It is like those little three-by-two front yards you see in suburban streets, the last contemptible vestige of the rolling park-lands and fair demesnes of a far-off feudal time. It is like the silly Latin mottoes and heraldic crests you see on the doors of automobiles. It is a fetish in England. The boy from the great public schools sets the fashion, and all the little tinpot grammar-schools and academies follow suit and ape the clothes and the manners and the speech, the mincing speech, of people of breeding. And the little professional people who live in suburban villas do the same. They all worship and fear the fetish, the Collar-and-Tie god. You had better fasten a mill-stone about your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea than say or be or do anything their despicable little code considers ill-bred. Oh yes, I knew what my brother meant by breeding, but my experience had not tallied with what I had been taught. Sometimes I have fancied that some strain of chivalry had kept him under the illusion of birth and gentility. And then I have come to the conclusion that he was one of those who see things so objectively that they impress one as automatons. They don't learn, they know. They live in the world as if it was their home. They use their passions and desires as animals use their instincts. They have no diffidence before the great facts of life. And having this franchise in their pockets, so to speak, this permanent pass to every quarter of the City of the World, having this animal candour of outlook, they are naturally inarticulate. They are easily misunderstood because self-expression is foreign to them and they have no interest in abstract propositions as such. They pick up a phrase and play with it for a while, just as a kitten will play with a ball, or a puppy will walk round with a piece of wood in his mouth, pretending it is a bone. My brother was a good example, I thought, of this. What he said sounded true, and as far as he knew was true, because he had not got it out of books. A man of 'good family' had put the idea into his head. No doubt he would forget it in a month or so. And whatever he might think or hear or say, he would go on living his very untrammelled life, unabashed by Time or the perplexities of existence, until....