‘Piece of hubris—an economical outrage, don’t you see; a gross anti-social and individualist demonstration. Hubris, you know, is Greek for insolence; at least, not quite insolence, but a sort of pride and overweening rebelliousness against the gods, the kind of arrogance that brings Nemesis after it, you understand. It was hubris in Agamemnon and Xerxes to go swelling about and ruffling themselves like turkey-cocks, because they were great conquerors and all that sort of thing; and it was their Nemesis to get murdered by Clytemnestra, or jolly well beaten by the Athenians at Salamis. Well, Le Breton always uses the word for anything that he thinks socially wrong—and he thinks a good many things socially wrong, I can tell you—anything that partakes of the nature of a class distinction, or a mere vulgar ostentation of wealth, or a useless waste of good, serviceable, labour-gotten material. He would call it hubris to have silver spoons when electroplate would do just as well; or to keep a valet for your own personal attendant, making one man into the mere bodily appanage of another; or to buy anything you didn’t really need, causing somebody else to do work for you which might otherwise have been avoided.’
‘Which Mr. Le Breton—the elder or the younger one?’
‘Oh, the younger—Ernest. As for Herbert, the Fellow of St. Aldate’s, he’s not troubled with any such scruples; he takes the world as he finds it.’
‘They’ve both gone in for their degrees, haven’t they?’
‘Yes, Herbert has got a fellowship; Ernest’s up in residence still looking about for one.’
‘It’s Ernest that would think my dress a piece of what-you-may-call-it?’
‘Yes, Ernest.’
‘Then I’m sure I shan’t like him. I should insist upon every woman’s natural right to wear the dress or hat or bonnet that suits her complexion best.’
‘You can’t tell, Edie, till you’ve met him. He’s a very good fellow; and of one thing I’m certain, whatever he thinks right he does, and sticks to it.’
‘But do YOU think, Harry, I oughtn’t to wear a new peacock-blue camel-hair dress on my first visit up to Oxford?’