To Be Gushingly Fawning To Those
Above Them, And Vulgarly Insolent To Everyone They Consider Below
Them, Is Their Idea
Of the way to hold and improve their position,
whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent
To
the rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their
opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth.
They are the women you see at private views, pushing themselves in
front of everybody else, standing before the picture so that no one
can get near it, and shouting out their silly opinions, which they
evidently imagine to be brilliantly satirical remarks, in strident
tones: the women who, in the stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all
through the performance; and who, having arrived in the middle of
the first act, and made as much disturbance as they know how, before
settling down in their seats, ostentatiously get up and walk out
before the piece is finished: the women who, at dinner-party and
"At Home" - that cheapest and most deadly uninteresting of all deadly
uninteresting social functions - (You know the receipt for a
fashionable "At Home," don't you? Take five hundred people, two-
thirds of whom do not know each other, and the other third of whom
cordially dislike each other, pack them, on a hot day, into a room
capable of accommodating forty, leave them there to bore one another
to death for a couple of hours with drawing-room philosophy and
second-hand scandal; then give them a cup of weak tea, and a piece
of crumbly cake, without any plate to eat it on; or, if it is an
evening affair, a glass of champagne of the you-don't-forget-you've-
had-it-for-a-week brand, and a ham-sandwich, and put them out into
the street again) - can do nothing but make spiteful remarks about
everybody whose name and address they happen to know:
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