So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the middle-class order.... After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end? It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class of human beings, but much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. “Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year,” she maintained. “That's my remedy.” In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed. “Twenty thousand,” she repeated with conviction. It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated intentions. “You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um,” said Lady Forthundred. “You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all after, isn't ut? “It's not an ideal arrangement.” “Tell me anything better,” said Lady Forthundred. On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in education, Lady Forthundred scored. We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him. “We're a peerage,” she said, “but none of us have ever had any nonsense about nobility.”