Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they
feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a
great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what
they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness,
order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this
round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit,
with conventions, and they are quite right.
I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues,
but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let
none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this
book.
So I thought of how I should put myself right with these people. I saw
that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who
forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet: that I was
an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the frontier into
Germany in the guise of a labourer:
