“Well, in our heart of hearts we’re _bourgeois_, we’re desperately _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 pretentiousness of a bogus genealogy in Burke, the grandfather who was a country attorney, or a plate-layer, or a groom. Some, with the energy still in them of all those ancestors who were honest shopkeepers or artisans, throw themselves from sheer boredom into every kind of dissipation.” “You talk like a Radical tub-thumper,” said Canon Spratte, with disdain. Lady Sophia shrugged 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 virtues and vices, are _bourgeois_ to the very marrow!” 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 hereditary honours like clothes several sizes too large for them? They meander through life aimlessly, like fish out of water. Look at Sir Peter Mason, whose father was President of some medical body at the Jubilee, 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 dowdy 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 Harry told her he wanted to marry Winnie?”