The crowd at these places is the prosperous crowd, the crowd which grumbles at income-tax and pays it.  Three hundred and seventy-five thousand persons paid income-tax last year, under protest:  they stand for the existence of perhaps a million souls, and this million is a handful floating more or less easily on the surface of the forty millions of the population.  The great majority of my readers must be somewhere in this million.  There can be few hirers of books who neither pay income-tax nor live on terms of dependent equality with those who pay it.  I see at the counters people on whose foreheads it is written that they know themselves to be the salt of the earth.  Their assured, curt voices, their proud carriage, their clothes, the similarity of their manners, all show that they belong to a caste and that the caste has been successful in the struggle for life.  It is called the middle-class, but it ought to be called the upper-class, for nearly everything is below it.  I go to the Stores, to Harrod’s Stores, to Barker’s, to Rumpelmeyer’s, to the Royal Academy, and to a dozen clubs in Albemarle Street and Dover Street, and I see again just the same crowd, well-fed, well-dressed, completely free from the cares which beset at least five-sixths of the English race.  They have worries; they take taxis because they must not indulge in motor-cars, hansoms because taxis are an extravagance, and omnibuses because they really must economize.  But they never look twice at twopence.  They curse the injustice of fate, but secretly they are aware of their luck.  When they have nothing to do, they say, in effect:  “Let’s go out and spend something.”  And they go out.  They spend their lives in spending.  They deliberately gaze into shop windows in order to discover an outlet for their money.  You can catch them at it any day.

* * * * *

I do not belong to this class by birth.  Artists very seldom do.  I was born slightly beneath it.  But by the help of God and strict attention to business I have gained the right of entrance into it.  I admit that I have imitated its deportment, with certain modifications of my own; I think its deportment is in many respects worthy of imitation.  I am acquainted with members of it; some are artists like myself; a few others win my sympathy by honestly admiring my work; and the rest I like because I like them.  But the philosopher in me cannot, though he has tried, melt away my profound and instinctive hostility to this class.  Instead of decreasing, my hostility grows.  I say to myself:  “I can never be content until this class walks along the street in a different manner, until that now absurd legend has been worn clean off its forehead.”  Henry Harland was not a great writer, but he said:  Il faut souffrir pour etre sel. I ask myself impatiently:  “When is this salt going to begin to suffer?” That is my attitude towards the class.  I frequent it but little.  Nevertheless I know it intimately, nearly all the intimacy being on my side.  For I have watched it during long, agreeable, sardonic months and years in foreign hotels.  In foreign hotels you get the essence of it, if not the cream.