‘Have you grown fonder of his coarse familiar jokes and the all-pervading smell of his gin-and-water?’ asked Fan, with scornful incredulity. ‘If so, perhaps you can also better appreciate young Dadd’s jewellery and Mrs. Dadd’s mock “umbleness,” like Uriah Heep’s, to hide her slyness and spitefulness. And you may have come to value, at their proper worth, the Polley girls’ giggles and shams, and their mother’s loud self-assertion and sheer impertinence. No doubt you admire their combined illiterateness and absorption in the pettiest gossip, their poor aping of the faults, or else their rude defiance of the merits, of their social superiors. Don’t you know that the Dadd and Polley idea of a life worth leading, is to make money in order to eat, drink, and lie in bed, to keep sporting dogs, attend low races and offer and accept bets, to have parties, “beaux,” and flirtations to the girls’ hearts’ content? Are greediness, laziness, bumptiousness and folly—gaudy, tawdry pretence, and coarse gorgeousness, such admirable qualities in men and women and their surroundings? I declare the Dadds and Polleys are the most irreverent undutiful people I know. Oh! Oliver, it is too horrible that the end of your cleverness and college training should be to condemn yourself, and me with you, to close contact and hopeless association with such people—when we have no relief to expect save from our own deterioration. We shall deteriorate and grow like our neighbours speedily, I daresay, and then we may not feel that we were ever fit for something better. But how we—one of us, at least—must suffer in the process of deterioration before it is complete!’ Fan was perfectly sincere, however absurd, in her horror and distress. She had a natural abhorrence of the vulgar, gross self-indulgence which she had described, and an intense yearning for its opposite, the true refinement of simplicity, self-restraint, and self-devotion, with its outward expression in the subtle charm of pure and graceful harmony. There was this to be said for Fan’s ambition, that it was not composed of coarse materials. It was neither sensual nor sordid. Fan would have been very tolerably content to be a poor lady among ladies and gentlemen. She would have made the very best of her gentle poverty, because she fully comprehended the self-respect involved in self-denial, the essential honour included in showing regard for the rights and claims of her neighbours, and in energy, diligence, and usefulness fitly exercised. Fan had the making of a real lady—rich or poor—in her. And if she were not speaking under a delusion, it was a pity that her vocation should be spoilt. But Oliver dealt her a stern rebuke.