self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.
You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when
it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have
wrapped about you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp,
enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still
do the work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now.
It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me
realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life
I have failed. Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out. I'm an
overstrung man. I go harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I
ride. I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural
ease of mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing
too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's
death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been,
first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every
one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness...." I do not see how
certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so
concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so
resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin
with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....

"Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it,
is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....

"After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth
I have to tell....

"If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real
life. It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow
creatures I have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the
work.... And I shall go on.

"But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
operation.

"It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps
I shall think no more about it.

"And beyond these things ther