“No,” said he.
“It is on the contrary,” said I still louder, “a rather subtle but undeniable truth.”
“Yes,” said he; and I then perceived that he was not listening.
I do not know what my hearers feel, but I fancy they feel with me that when a gentleman of birth and position is amiable enough to talk to a person of neither it is particularly galling to discover that that person is so unable to grasp the true aspect of the situation as to neglect even to follow the conversation. Good breeding (as I have before remarked, a great hinderer) prevents one’s explaining who one is and emphasizing who the other person is and doing then and there a sum of subtraction between one’s own value and his and offering him the result for his closer inspection, so what is one to do? Stiffen and go dumb, I suppose. Good breeding allows no more. Alas, there are many and heavy drawbacks to being a gentleman.
Raggett had evidently not been listening to a word I said, for after his last abstracted “Yes,” he suddenly turned the glassiness of his eye full upon me.
“I did not know,” he said, “when I saw you in church——”
Really the breeding that could go back to the church and what happened there was too bad for words. My impulse was to stop him by saying “Shall we dance?” but I was too uncertain of the extent, nay of the existence, of his powers of seeing fun to venture.
“—that you were not English, or I should not have asked——”
“Sir,” I interrupted, endeavouring to get him at all cost out of the church, “who, after all, is English?”
He looked surprised. “Well,” said he, “I am.”