I have asked many of my acquaintances at what point in their childhood or adolescence they became class-conscious, but have never been given a satisfactory answer. I remember when it happened to me. When I was four and a half I caught scarlet fever; my younger brother had just been born, and it was impossible for me to have scarlet fever in the house, so I was sent off to a public fever hospital. There was only one other bourgeois child in the ward; the rest were all proletarians. I did not notice particularly that the attitude of the nurses or the other patients to me was different; I accepted the kindness and spoiling easily, because I was accustomed to it. But I was astonished at the respect and even reverence that this other little boy, a clergyman’s child, was given. ‘Oh,’ the nurses would cry after he had gone; ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘he did look a little gentleman in his pretty white pellisse when they came to take him away.’ ‘He was a fair toff,’ echoed the little proletarians. When I came home from hospital, after being there about two months, my accent was commented on and I was told that the boys in the ward had been very vulgar. I did not know what ‘vulgar’ meant; it had to be explained to me. About a year later I met Arthur, a boy of about nine, who had been in the ward and taught me how to play cricket when I was getting better; I was then at my first preparatory school and he was a ragged errand-boy. In hospital we had all worn the same hospital nightgown, and I had not realized that we came off such different shelves. But now I suddenly recognized with my first shudder of gentility that there were two sorts of people—ourselves and the lower classes. The servants were trained to call us children, even when we were tiny, Master Robert, Miss Rosaleen, and Miss Clarissa, but I had not realized that these were titles of respect. I had thought of ‘Master’ and ‘Miss’ merely as vocative prefixes used when addressing other people’s children. But now I realized that the servants were the lower classes, and that we were ourselves. I accepted this class separation as naturally as I had accepted religious dogma, and did not finally discard gentility until nearly twenty years later. My mother and father were never of the aggressive, shoot-’em-down type. They were Liberals or, more strictly, Liberal-Unionists. In religious theory, at least, they treated their employees as fellow-creatures. But social distinctions remained clearly defined. That was religion too: He made them high or lowly, And ordered their estates.