But my visitors are kindly and courteous people, and felt, I am sure, that they were both receiving and conferring benefits.  They will like to describe me and my house, and they will feel that I am pleased at being received on equal terms into county society.  I don’t put this down at all cynically; but they are not people with whom I have anything in common.  I am not of their monde at all.  I belong to the middle class, and they are of the upper class.  I have a faint desire to indicate that I don’t want to cross the border-line, and that what I desire is the society of interesting and congenial people, not the society of my social superior.  This is not unworldliness in the least, merely hedonism.  Feudalism runs in the blood of these people, and they feel, not consciously but quite instinctively, that the confer a benefit by making my acquaintance.  “No doubt but ye are the people,” as Job said, but I do not want to rise in the social scale.  It would be the earthen pot and the brazen pot at best.  I am quite content with my own class, and life is not long enough to change it, and to learn the habits of another.  I have no quarrel with the aristocracy, and do not in the least wish to level them to the ground.  I am quite prepared to acknowledge them as the upper class.  They are, as a rule, public-spirited, courteous barbarians, with a sense of honour and responsibility.  But they take a great many things as matters of course which are to me simply alien.  I no more wish to live with them than Wright, my self-respecting gardener, wishes to live with me—­though so deeply rooted are feudal ideas in the blood of the race, that Wright treats me with a shade of increased deference because I have been entertaining a party of Lords and Ladies; and the Vicar’s wife said to Maud that she heard we had been giving a very grand party, and would soon be quite county people.  The poor woman will think more of my books than she has ever thought before.  I don’t think this is snobbish, because it is so perfectly instinctive and natural.

But what I wanted to say was that this is the kind of benefit which is conferred by success; and for a quiet person, who likes familiar and tranquil ways, it is no benefit at all; indeed, rather the reverse; unless it is a benefit that the stationmaster touched his hat to me to-day, which he has never done before.  It is a funny little world.  Meanwhile I have no ideas, and my visitors to-day haven’t given me any, though Lord Wilburton might be a useful figure in a book; so perfectly appointed, so quiet, so deferential, so humorous, so deliciously insincere!

October 4, 1888.