was simply writing which, obviously, had no real meaning
whatsoever, and obviously—well, read the
thing—was not intended to have any meaning.
A fine deed was fine precisely in proportion to the
social position of the person who performed it.
Scott’s death at the South Pole, when that was
announced in 1913, was fine because he was a gentleman.
The disaster of the colliers entombed in the Welsh
Senghenydd mine which happened in the same year was
sad. “How sad!” She read the account,
on the first day, with the paper held up wide open
and said “How sad!” and turned on to something
for which the paper might be folded back at the place
and read comfortably. Scott’s death she
read with the paper folded back at the account.
She liked seeing the pictures of Lady Scott and of
Scott’s little boy. She read the caption
under one of the pictures of the wives and families
of the four hundred and twenty-nine colliers killed
in the Senghenydd mine, but not under any of the others.
The point she noted was that all the women “of
that class” wore “those awful cloth caps",—the
colliers’ women just the same as the women in
the mean streets of Tidborough Old Town.
She was never particularly grateful for anything given
to her or done for her; not because she was not pleased
and glad but because she could invest a gift with
no imagination of the feelings of the giver. The
thing was a present just as a pound of bacon was a
pound of bacon. You said thank you for the present
just as you ate the bacon. What more was to be
said?
She revelled in gossip, that is to say in discussion
with her own class of the manners and doings of other
people. She thought charity meant giving jelly
and red flannel to the poor; she thought generosity
meant giving money to some one; she thought selfishness
meant not giving money to some one. She had no
idea that the only real charity is charity of mind,
and the only real generosity generosity of mind, and
the only real selfishness selfishness of mind.
And she simply would not have understood it if it
had been explained to her. As people are judged,
she was entirely nice, entirely worthy, entirely estimable.
And with that, for it does not enter into such estimates,
she had neither feelings of the mind nor of the heart
but only of the senses. All that her senses set
before her she either overvalued or undervalued:
she was the complete and perfect snob in the most
refined and purest meaning of the word.
She was much liked, and she liked many.
CHAPTER V
I
The Penny Green Garden House Development Scheme was
begun in 1910. In 1908, the year of the measles
and the separated bedrooms, no shadow of it had yet
been thrown. It never occurred to any one that
a railway would one day link Penny Green with Tidborough
and all the rest of the surrounding world, or that
a railway to Tidborough was desirable. Sabre
bicycled in daily to Fortune, East and Sabre’s,
and the daily ride to and fro had become a curious
pleasure to him.
Copyrights
If Winter Comes from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
