What, except any one of a score of others from the same book, could give a more admirable condensed example of sophistication than the passage I have quoted from _The Green Hat_? The narrator introduces you to two ladies--for no reason at all except your amusement and his own. One lady has a title, the other has not. Excellent! He--I have to call him ‘he’ because I do not remember that his name is once mentioned in the book--pokes good-humoured fun at both, but more especially at the one with a title, and then goes on innocently (_innocently!_) to reveal the fact that he comes from the lower classes and does not know how to ride. You will go far to find a rarer expression of sophistication. For--do you not see?--the narrator, at his ease in the homes of the great, is smiling at class, is actually smiling at riding. This is, by consummate inversion, raising snobbishness to a fine art. And all in such high spirits. You do not get the high spirits in the two passages I have quoted from a rather long marital conversation in _Some Do Not ..._ (you will look for them in vain in that novel); but you are given a very pretty example of sophistication nevertheless. Sylvia Tietjens is of a most awfully good family, and her husband of an even better one. People in society are not, by plebeians, supposed to throw things at one another. Sylvia does throw something--a plate of food--at her husband. Good! Moreover, it hits him. But observe! He does not upset the dining-room table and hit her back. He remains perfectly calm. And as for Sylvia, she drifts slowly towards the enormous mirror over the fireplace (good touch, that!) and remarks that she is bored! bored! Here, too, you are high in the scale of sophistication. For it is obvious that to commit a breach of manners, to do something that simply is not done, and then only to feel bored, is far more sophisticated than to break one of the ten commandments, usually the seventh, in the same spirit. Also I call your attention in passing to the contents of the plate that Sylvia threw--two cold cutlets in aspic and a few leaves of salad. At once elegant and efficient. The second passage, too, is admirable. The words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ are not popularly supposed to be addressed by a gentleman to his wife; nor is the wish that she may rot in hell. Yet when Sylvia suggests to her husband that, to ensure their mutual happiness, he ought to have addressed her in this manner, he says reasonably: ‘That’s, of course, true.’ Which is all the more to his credit in that for twenty pages his uniform has been dripping with oil from the salad that hit his shoulder.