often do."

"Bad taste!" snorted Matilda.

"Yes—we all do. No gentleman ever tells people in words that he is one—Fred and Bert say it once a week, at least. They lay the greatest stress on it. No real gentlemen get huffy and touchy; they are too sure of themselves and do not pretend anything, they are quite natural and you take them as they are. They don't do one thing at home at ease, and another when they are dressed up, and they aren't a bit ashamed of knowing anyone. Fred does not speak to Ernie Gibbs when he is out with Mabel, although they were at school together!"

"Ernie Gibbs! Why, Kitten, he is only a foreman in the Bindon Gas Works! Of course not! Mabel would take on!"

[Pg 30]

[Pg 30]

Matilda thought her sister was being too stupid!

"Yes, I am sure she would—that is just it——"

"And quite right, too!"

Katherine shrugged her shoulders. There was not much use in arguing with Matilda, she felt, Matilda who had never thought out any problem for herself in her life—Matilda who had not the privilege of knowing any attractive Lord Algys!—and who therefore could not have grasped the immeasurable gulf that she, Katherine, had found lay between his class and hers!

"They say Fred is a capable auctioneer because father and grandfather were—you hear people saying 'it is in the blood'—Well, why is it, Tild?—Because heredity counts just as it does in animals, of course. So why, if a man's father and grandfather, and much further back still, have been gentlemen commanding their inferiors, and fulfilling the duties of their station, should not the traits which mean that show as plainly as the auctioneer traits show in Fred——?"

Matilda had no answer ready, she felt resentful; but words did not come, so Katherine went on:

"You can't jump straight to things; they either have to come by instinct through a long line of forebears, or you have to have intelligence enough to make yourself acquire the outward signs of them, through watching and learning from those who you can see for 

 Prev. P 22/282 next