“Be he ne’er so vile This day shall gentle his condition.” To taste so richly the fine essence of good manners was a rare and memorable privilege. Those who were guests betrayed even in retrospect their fine appreciation of courtly values. To them it was no charity, no prescriptive dole. “Ay, sir,” said Mr Giles next day, “that was a joyful touch!” Many of us, I imagine, who have had the good fortune to see the best, as well as the worst, of those who live the plainer and humbler lives, must have been struck by the pleasant heartiness of natural English manners, when they are not complicated by an uncertainty as to social position. A household known to me welcomed during the war some girls from a factory at a mid-day meal which, for all the simplicity of its preparation, went a trifle beyond the custom of its guests in the way of accessories. Not for one moment were they flustered. “I guess I’ll follow you,” was the simple remark to her hostess of one guest, and all difficulty vanished. A radiant party, bent theatre-ward, left the house to its elderly owners, whose daughter received on the doorstep the ecstatic comment “I just _love_ the dear old dad,” a tribute which the “dad,” a gentleman of some eminence in a learned profession, received with legitimate pride. It all comes back to simplicity of heart, which only belongs to those who are firm in their niche and can look around them. The betwixt-and-betweens are always nervous, and shyness will make them sheepish, self-assertive, familiar, vulgar or dumb according to their temperaments. These wobblers, wherever they are found in the social ladder, all drop good manners with the same anxious trepidation, the rich in the halls of the great, the clerk and his wife in the middle-class drawing room, the wife of the country townsman on the precarious fringe of the county, the shallow prig in the presence of the artist, in fact, the snob generally on the threshold of his desire.