From the high caste English Brahmins down to the lowest caste of English Shudras there seems to be no boundary lines or rules. No one knows where he is, and is forever in danger of being snubbed and humiliated, except, perhaps, the very high mucky-mucks, who assume a kind of divine air of superiority and immaculateness. It appears that a man who acts as wholesale agent for a firm in England, occupying a little office only large enough to hold a table and chair, is in “society” because he is a wholesaler. Another whose business takes up a number of buildings, selling anything from a steam engine to a hairpin, giving employment to a thousand or more people, is not in society because he is a retailer. He is obliged to be a man of superior ability, while the wholesale agent may be but a popinjay. The one can draw cheques for lacs of rupees at a time, while the boarding-house keeper and dhoby of the other have to wait months for their pay. I was told of a case where a clerk in a large firm fell in love with a daughter of his landlady, a bright, intelligent girl, the mother owning considerable property. They were married. The next day his fellow clerks, receiving each a couple hundred dibs a month, and often overdrawing their wages to get tennis suits and neckties, drew up a petition requesting the benedict to resign his clerkship, as they only associated with gentlemen. This miserable, degrading notion about caste or labor often inflicts the greatest hardships. A Scotch lady, a neighbor of my hostess, called. She was of excellent family, formerly in good financial circumstances, but now greatly reduced by some misfortune. She had two grown up daughters, well educated and in society. She was lamenting over the impoverished condition of the family, and said, “I know how to take care of sick people, and would gladly go out as a nurse and so earn some money to help keep the pot boiling, but what would society say, and what would become of my daughters? Their prospects would be ruined, and they would always be spoken of as ‘the daughters of that old Scotch nurse.’ So I am obliged to sit idle at home, when we need a little money so badly.” As to shop-keepers, tradesmen, they are another breed or caste altogether, and never taken into consideration by “society.” This is a strange thing under the sun to me. When the English are a nation of shop-keepers—and Napoleon knew what he was saying—when the very substructure of England’s life and prosperity is commercial business, buying and selling truck, I cannot see why they should so despise their own trade.