cause I grew liker my father every day--and who knew
with inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in the
world--except the place that concealed my father--and in some details
mine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her saying
now, "No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United
Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom." She had much
exercise in placing people's servants about her tea-table, where the
etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of
housekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would have
made of a chauffeur....

On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover--if
for no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively,
believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled
me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the
structure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to
almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign
inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that
England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had
Reform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no essential
revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in
as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, either
impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the
reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the
distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually in
the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after
lost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never even
symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact
in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old
habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone. And America
too, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of that estate which
has expanded in queer ways. George Washington, Esquire, was of the
gentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know,
and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington
being a King....

IV

I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else at
Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and
Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house. They we