To which Horace replied by return:
“Dear old Father,
I wish you would not split your verbs so recklessly.
To resist the condescension of the new aristocracy in the way you suggest would be, for you, utterly disastrous, both as a matter of good taste and as a dramatic effect—to say nothing of a bid for social distinction.
The test of good manners in the highly placed is the capacity for the exercise of extreme insolence without offence to the estimation of the class. What would be a vulgarity in you or me is a splendid airiness in the Prime Minister. Your fine gentleman may seduce a lady’s maid, but must not be seen to cheat at cards. The tears of a seduced woman set the tables of the new nobility a-titter; but to win a guinea by oversharp practice with trumps is to discover the moth amongst the ermine on the cloak of honour. Your courtier’s manners are but gaudy beads strung on a thread of menial subtleties. You have not the practice, my dear father; and would only blunder upon the indecencies.
The new aristocracy demands our patience—it takes three hundred years of usage before a family becomes quite used to its own nobility; by that time it is usually bankrupt.
It is only possible for a man of birth and unassailable breeding to become a radical without appearing ridiculous.
Your affectionate son,
Horace.”
CHAPTER XXXIV
Which, to some extent, discloses the Incident of the Sentimental Tea-cups
Anthony, forestalling the youngster’s fretting for the girl’s companionship, decided to send him up to Oxford at once; but with all haste it was some months before he could go, and the lad, though he stuck manfully to his heavy work with the tutor, became languid and listless and vague. He fretted silently, and was filled with an ugly distrust of those about him. It had brought to him a sudden revelation of the need to stand alone—a revelation that is a part of the heritage of life to all at emergence from youth, but comes to some roughly enough.
He grimly forbore from asking questions, and fell away from his frank boyish friendship with his own people—the cheery, intimate, and open good-fellowship with his father and his mother gave way to a strange aloofness, and there developed in its place a self-reliance and a haughty desire to try the wings of his own judgment that bred much foolishness, as well as strength. His mother sadly put down the lad’s cubbishness to the coming of manhood, and accepted much of the brusqueness as being a part of the inevitable period of cubhood when the whelp is for trying its strength and for leaving the litter.
The lad’s arrival at Oxford started the man’s shadow in him to life. He moved towards the shadow eagerly, and grasped at the reality which cast it. Flung suddenly into a sea of youth of his own age, he was at grips with his own strength at once—tried it, as by instinct, against the wills of the youths about him, all of whom, also come abroad out of their homes, were essaying their strength and affections and cunning upon each other, straining the cords wilfully to the breaking pitch both of the affections and of the hostilities.
It was the best thing that could have happened to the young blood; the strain of the life kept him from the fret of the injustice that had been put upon him, and drew his mind for awhile from brooding on the blackness of the empty place where his natural mate had until now moved in dainty harmony with his existence.