“I hope I shall,” said Frothingham. He was smiling to himself—evidently Barney wasn’t above a weakness for a lord. “It was a good stroke any way you look at it, my going with the Longviews,” he reflected. “It’s made Barney jealous, and he thinks more of me than ever.”
He divided his time unevenly between the Longviews and Barney. He wished to introduce Barney to them, but Longview hysterically refused. “It’s all right for you, Frothingham,” he explained. “But we can’t afford to do it. How’d you like to be introduced to middle-class English?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t mind. I’d just forget ’em the next time we met. The beggars ’d expect it and wouldn’t think of annoying me.”
“Precisely—precisely,” said Longview. “But our—that is—the American middle-classes are different. They don’t understand differences of social position, or pretend not to. If this Barney person were presented to us, he probably wouldn’t take the cut when we met again, but would come straight up to us. You’ve no idea how impudent they are.”
“But why do you call him middle-class? Ain’t he rich?” asked Frothingham.
Longview looked at him tragically. “Birth and breeding count with us just as—I mean count in America just as in England.”
“Gad, they don’t count in England any more, except against one. But we can’t get it out of our heads that you Americans go in for equality and all that sort of thing.”
“Not at all. Not at all,” Longview protested. “The lines are the more closely drawn because there are no official lines.”
“But what’s the matter with Barney? He seems right enough. I’ve got uncles that are worse. Gad, there’s one of ’em I could get rich on if I could cage him and show him at a shilling a look.”
“My dear Frothingham, this Barney keeps a retail shop. Even in New York they draw the line at retail shops.”