The two families were dumbfounded.
“I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money’s worth.”
“Buy a big place,” said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses. “Go back from the main roads where land’s so dear.”
Wheatlands nodded. “That’s a good idea,” said he. “There’ll be plenty of roads after a while.”
Edna was ready to depart. “Then it’s settled?” said she.
Her father nodded. “I’m willing to see what can be done. But I’d rather not have Ben Loring along. He’d interfere with a good bargain.”
“Yes, you go alone, Willie,” said my father. “Anyhow, I’ve got to ’tend store. I can’t afford a boy any more.”
The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly the weed of snobbishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing—that the snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth, and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked.
Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste feeling came that day, came when my people and Edna’s, discovering that we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class.
My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the majesty of wealth. “Why don’t you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey?” she finally inquired. “Then you wouldn’t seem so boyish like.”