d English life, with its classes and masses and so
on. I was thinking about it this afternoon when you nearly ran over me.
Pride is at the bottom of half the misery in England. Personal integrity
is all I ask of a man, modesty what I admire most in a woman. As for
what you call splashing through mud in dress-pumps, I know what you mean
and I avoid it. _Worthless_ women are to be found in all grades.
Marriage, no doubt, is a lottery, not only for us, but for the women. I
doubt if taking thought ever makes it any less of a lottery. You say we
Carvilles have no luck with our women. I wonder what 'our women' would
say if they heard you. Are we the last word in humanity? Are we flawless
in our integrity and purpose and achievement?'

"My brother shook his head without looking up from his plate.

"'That's not what I meant at all,' he remarked sullenly. 'That sort of
thing doesn't apply to women. I was referring to breeding. Women of
breeding would not trust themselves to us.'

"'Well,' I said, 'I shan't lose any sleep about it. If I were chief of a
passenger ship, the lady-passengers of breeding----'

"My brother waved his hand. 'Let us dry up,' he said. 'You don't
understand.'

"But I did! I knew exactly what he meant and many a bitter hour it had
cost me when I was infatuated with the convent-bred miss who had
trotted after him as soon as he had whistled 'come!' Breeding! The cant
of it. The silly dishonesty of it! It is like those little three-by-two
front yards you see in suburban streets, the last contemptible vestige
of the rolling park-lands and fair demesnes of a far-off feudal time. It
is like the silly Latin mottoes and heraldic crests you see on the doors
of automobiles. It is a fetish in England. The boy from the great public
schools sets the fashion, and all the little tinpot grammar-schools and
academies follow suit and ape the clothes and the manners and the
speech, the mincing speech, of people of breeding. And the little
professional people who live in suburban villas do the same. They all
worship and fear the fetish, the Collar-and-Tie god. You had better
fasten a mill-stone about your neck and be drowned in the depths of the
sea than say or be or do anything their despicable little code considers
ill-bred. Oh yes, I knew what my brother meant by breeding, but my
experience had not tallied with what I had been taught. Sometimes I have
fancied that some strain of chivalry had kept him under the illusion o