nt?

"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked a
gleam of curiosity.... "You want," she said, "to say to the aristocracy,
'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the
monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"

"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."

"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are
off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues....
They cost a lot of money, you know."

So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not
stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable
minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was
something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely.
The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson
talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes
of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men
display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men,
their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that
are the essence of the middle-class order....

After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type
and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?

It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, but
much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance,
fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a
towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and
black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins
and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the
great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent
and intonation were exactly what you would expect from a rather
commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am
afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from
below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my
informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on
the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all
a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained. "That's
my remedy."

In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.

"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.

It occurred to me that I was in the prese