but that irritate like
blazes. I've talked about it with mother. She used to think I was the
sort of chap who'd do what Uncle Peter did. Uncle Peter frightened me
off that kind of thing!"

It was absurd, Henry thought, to think that all women were like Uncle
Peter's wife. Sheila was not that sort of girl at all. She would not
make a man feel ashamed!...

He broke off in the middle of his thoughts to listen to Gilbert who was
enunciating a doctrine that was new to Henry.

"There are aristocrats and there are plebs," said Gilbert, "and they
won't mingle. That's all about it. I believe that the majority of the
working people are different from us, not only in their habits ...
that's nothing ... just the veneer ... but in their nature. We've been
achieved somehow ... evolution and that sort of thing ... because they
needed people to look after them and direct them and control them. We're
as different from working people as a race-horse is from a cart-horse.
Things that are quite natural to us are simply finicky fussy things to
them. I wish to God talking like this didn't make a fellow feel like a
prig!..."

He broke off almost angrily.

"Let's go out," he said. "I want to smoke!"

"But it's true all the same," he went on when they got outside, almost
as if he had not broken his speech. "Whether we tried for it or not,
we've got people separated into groups, and we'll never get them out of
them. Some of us are servants and some of us are bosses, and we've
developed natures like that, and we can't get away from them!" Henry
reminded them of men who had climbed from low positions to high
positions. "They're the accidents," Gilbert went on. "They prove
nothing, and I'm certain that if you could go back into their ancestry,
you'd find they sprang from people like us, who had somehow slithered
down until the breed told and a turn up was taken!..."

They argued round and round the subject, admitting here, denying
there....

"Anyhow," Gilbert ended, "it is true that a man who marries a village
girl makes a mistake, isn't it?"

"Not always," Henry replied.

"Nearly always," said Gilbert.

"Uncle Peter made a mistake anyhow," Ninian said.

6

He went to his room, pleading that he was tired, to write his letter to
Sheila before dinner. As he was going upstairs, Mary began to descend,
and he saw that her look was brighter.

"Go back," she called to him, waving her hand as if to thrust him down
the stairs again. "