bound—­so light.”  And it was in July that Holm Oaks, as a gathering-place of the elect, was at its best.  For in July it had become customary to welcome there many of those poor souls from London who arrived exhausted by the season, and than whom no seamstress in a two-pair back could better have earned a holiday.  The Dennants themselves never went to London for the season.  It was their good pleasure not to.  A week or fortnight of it satisfied them.  They had a radical weakness for fresh air, and Antonia, even after her presentation two seasons back, had insisted on returning home, stigmatising London balls as “stuffy things.”

When Shelton arrived the stream had only just begun, but every day brought fresh, or rather jaded, people to occupy the old, dark, sweet-smelling bedrooms.  Individually, he liked his fellow-guests, but he found himself observing them.  He knew that, if a man judged people singly, almost all were better than himself; only when judged in bulk were they worthy of the sweeping criticisms he felt inclined to pass on them.  He knew this just as he knew that the conventions, having been invented to prevent man following his natural desires, were merely the disapproving sums of innumerable individual approvals.

It was in the bulk; then, that he found himself observing.  But with his amiability and dread of notoriety he remained to all appearance a well-bred, docile creature, and he kept his judgments to himself.

In the matter of intellect he made a rough division of the guests—­those who accepted things without a murmur, those who accepted them with carping jocularity; in the matter of morals he found they all accepted things without the semblance of a kick.  To show sign of private moral judgment was to have lost your soul, and, worse, to be a bit of an outsider.  He gathered this by intuition rather than from conversation; for conversation naturally tabooed such questions, and was carried on in the loud and cheerful tones peculiar to people of good breeding.  Shelton had never been able to acquire this tone, and he could not help feeling that the inability made him more or less an object of suspicion.  The atmosphere struck him as it never had before, causing him to feel a doubt of his gentility.  Could a man suffer from passion, heart-searchings, or misgivings, and remain a gentleman?  It seemed improbable.  One of his fellow-guests, a man called Edgbaston, small-eyed and semi-bald, with a dark moustache and a distinguished air of meanness, disconcerted him one day by remarking of an unknown person, “A half-bred lookin’ chap; did n’t seem to know his mind.”  Shelton was harassed by a horrid doubt.

Everything seemed divided into classes, carefully docketed and valued.  For instance, a Briton was of more value than a man, and wives than women.  Those things or phases of life with which people had no personal acquaintance were regarded with a faint amusement and a certain disapproval.  The principles of the upper class, in fact, were strictly followed.