‘I agree to a certain degree,’ said Miss Mohun; ‘but still I am not sure what it does express.’
‘Just what girls of that sort are,’ said Gillian. ‘Mere worshippers of any sort of handle to one’s name.’
‘Gillian, Gillian, you are not going in for levelling,’ cried Aunt Adeline.
‘No,’ said Gillian; ‘but I call it snobbish to make more fuss about Alethea’s concern than Phyllis’s—just because he calls himself Lord—’
‘That is to a certain degree true,’ said Miss Mohun. ‘The worth of the individual man stands first of all, and nothing can be sillier or in worse taste than to parade one’s grand relations.’
‘To parade, yes,’ said Aunt Adeline; ‘but there is no doubt that good connections are a great advantage.’
‘Assuredly,’ said Miss Mohun. ‘Good birth and an ancestry above shame are really a blessing, though it has come to be the fashion to sneer at them. I do not mean merely in the eyes of the world, though it is something to have a name that answers for your relations being respectable. But there are such things as hereditary qualities, and thus testimony to the existence of a distinguished forefather is worth having.’
‘Lily’s dear old Sir Maurice de Mohun to wit,’ said Miss Adeline. ‘You know she used to tease Florence by saying the Barons of Beechcroft had a better pedigree than the Devereuxes.’
‘I’d rather belong to the man who made himself,’ said Gillian.
‘Well done, Gill! But though your father won his own spurs, you can’t get rid of his respectable Merrifield ancestry wherewith he started in life.’