“It goes a great deal too far,” said Lady Massingberd. “I never knew how dreadful you were.”
“May the prisoner at the bar speak?” said Helen. “She’s going to, anyhow. It’s just this. I’m human.”
She pointed her finger suddenly at Lady Massingberd. “Gracie, don’t say I’m much too human,” she said, “because that’s cheap. And you get into humanity most surely and quickly by going blind for the people who have succeeded in their own lines. I adore them. I don’t particularly care what they do, so long as they do it better than anybody else. If that is being a snob—well, I am one. I like people about whom the world is talking. They are concentrated people. They may be colossally rich, and that’s interesting, because they smoulder with power. They may sing, they may tell me, like Mr. Stoughton, that I’m a thief: they may dance. I like the grit that makes success. It’s what they are that interests me, not what they do.”
“In the case of the dancer, it’s what his legs do,” said Gracie succinctly.
“My dear, your great fault is that you can’t forgive,” said Helen. “You are pricking me with pins because I said you were genteel. That’s small of you. Now whatever I am, I’m not small. I’m not bound like you by any restriction of class: I’m much more a woman than a lady, if that makes it clearer to you. I don’t care whether the person who interests me comes from a slum, or South Kensington, or a palace: it doesn’t seem to me to matter. Therein I’m much bigger also than people like Mr. Stoughton, and those novelists, for whom, as someone said, the sun always rises in the East End. They think that if you dress for dinner you can’t be interesting. That’s a shallow view, if you like.”
Lord Thorley, with a wrinkling movement of his nose, displaced the pince-nez which he habitually wore. This gave him a lost sort of look.
“I don’t know where we’ve got to,” he remarked.
“We’ve got to the fact that I am more human than either of you, and therefore bigger. I know perfectly well how to be grande dame and how to be gamin. I know it from the inside too: I am both. Grote used to say that he never knew which of me was coming down in the morning. But whichever it was, it always adored people.”
Lord Thorley gave a long, abstracted sigh.
“That is so amazing of you,” he said. “I can’t understand your being so completely taken up with people, as individuals, as you are. Collectively I agree with you: when people form masses and parties, you can deal with the principles that are evolved.”