toes and sipping
elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated
flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished,
and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.

Then there came and went on these floors over our respectful heads, the
Company; people I rarely saw, but whose tricks and manners were imitated
and discussed by their maids and valets in the housekeeper's room and
the steward's room--so that I had them through a medium at second hand.
I gathered that none of the company were really Lady Drew's equals, they
were greater and lesser after the manner of all things in our world.
Once I remember there was a Prince, with a real live gentleman in
attendance, and that was a little above our customary levels and excited
us all, and perhaps raised our expectations unduly. Afterwards, Rabbits,
the butler, came into my mother's room downstairs, red with indignation
and with tears in his eyes. "Look at that!" gasped Rabbits. My mother
was speechless with horror. That was a sovereign, a mere sovereign, such
as you might get from any commoner!

After Company, I remember, came anxious days, for the poor old women
upstairs were left tired and cross and vindictive, and in a state of
physical and emotional indigestion after their social efforts....

On the lowest fringe of these real Olympians hung the vicarage people,
and next to them came those ambiguous beings who are neither quality nor
subjects. The vicarage people certainly hold a place by themselves in
the typical English scheme; nothing is more remarkable than the progress
the Church has made--socially--in the last two hundred years. In the
early eighteenth century the vicar was rather under than over the
house-steward, and was deemed a fitting match for the housekeeper or any
not too morally discredited discard. The eighteenth century literature
is full of his complaints that he might not remain at table to share the
pie. He rose above these indignities because of the abundance of younger
sons. When I meet the large assumptions of the contemporary cleric, I
am apt to think of these things. It is curious to note that to-day that
down-trodden, organ-playing creature, the Church of England village
Schoolmaster, holds much the same position as the seventeenth century
parson. The doctor in Bladesover ranked below the vicar but above the
"vet," artists and summer visitors squeezed in above or below this point
according to t