ow tell me: do you
know what impression polite society made on me?"

"Dont understand."

"Perhaps it has never occurred even to you, sharp as you are, that I
could have taken society otherwise than at its own valuation of itself,
as something much higher, more cultivated and refined than anything that
I had been accustomed to. Well, I never believed in that much at any
time; but it was not until I had made a _mesalliance_ for Marian's sake
that I realized how infinitely beneath me and my class was the one I had
married into."

"_Mesalliance!_--with Marian! I take back the shake hands."

"_Mesalliance_ with her class, for her sake: I made the distinction
purposely. Now what am I, Miss McQuinch? A worker. I belonged and belong
to the class that keeps up the world by its millions of serviceable
hands and serviceable brains. All the pride of caste in me settles on
that point. I admit no loafer as my equal. The man who is working at the
bench is my equal, whether he can do my day's work or not, provided he
is doing the best he can. But the man who does not work anyhow, and the
class that does not work, is a class below mine. When I annoyed Marian
by refusing to wear a tall hat and cuffs, I did so because I wanted to
have it seen as I walked through Piccadilly and St. James's Street that
I did not belong there, just as your people walk through a poor street
dressed so as to shew that they dont belong there. To me a man like your
uncle, Marian's father, or like Marmaduke or Douglas, loafing idly round
spending money that has been made by the sweat of men like myself, are
little better than thieves. They get on with the queerest makeshifts for
self-respect: old Mr. Lind with family pride. Douglas with personal
vanity, and Marmaduke with a sort of interest in his own appetites and
his own jollity. Everything is a sham with them: they have drill and
etiquet instead of manners, fashions instead of tastes, small talk
instead of intercourse. Everything that is special to them as
distinguished from workers is a sham: when you get down to the real
element in them, good or bad, you find that it is something that is
common to them and to all civilized mankind. The reason that this isnt
as clear to other workmen who come among them as it is to me is that
most workmen share their ignorance of the things they affect superiority
in. Poor Jackson, whom you all call the Yankee cad, and who is not a cad
at all in his proper place among the