nsive brands. No luck
with our women, observe. I certainly had had no luck with Gladys. But
he, he, to whom women ran as though he were a necromancer, as though he
had the secret of some spell that would make them forever youthful and
lovely and happy--what complaint dared he make against them? Yet he had
formulated the monstrous theory that 'our family' must either succumb to
the lower-middle class or die out because of our unfortunate luck with
our women. It was one of those propositions which are simply
preposterous in theory, but perfectly true in fact. As I washed my face
in that expensive basin and rubbed it with the expensive towels and
brushed my hair with the expensive ivory-backed brushes, I lighted upon
this interesting feature of my brother's thesis. It was true. What I
could not get over was how the dickens he had discovered it, living as
he did. It struck me as a good example of the cleverness that is so much
more useful than either genius or industry. I doubt if he had any clear
notion of what was meant by psychology, but he had intuitively divined
an obscure flaw in our complicated mentality, a flaw searching back to
some unsavoury interlude in our history. Of course, by lower-middle
class he meant servants. This silent chap in black, with the hair
growing low by his ears, would be of that class, the lower-middle.
And--here I put the ivory-backed brushes down carefully and looked at
myself as though I saw a stranger in the glass--and what was more, by
the same token, was not I, a seafaring man, also one of the
lower-middle? Good heavens! I became so tangled up in the new points of
view suddenly illuminated by my brother's outrageous remarks that I
nearly stepped into his expensive porcelain bath again. And then I heard
him calling to me that the soup was getting cold, and I followed the
servant into a small dining room singularly bare of everything save the
indispensable belongings of a meal. Even the pictures were limited to
one on each wall, as though more might distract the diner from his food.
Except for a light over the lift opening there were only two electric
candles with lemon shades on the table, where my brother sat, bolt
upright, eating soup.

"Now, you know, I laughed as I sat down, because I would not have lived
in this fashion at all. My idea of comfort, I reflected, was probably
lower-middle. It included a high tea, with real food to eat, and a book
propped up against the tea-cosy while I