“Temper! I hope I have too much philosophy to allow my temper to be ruffled by the clumsy horse-jokes of my acquaintances.”
“But why are you always at home to these Browns?”
Bertram hesitates.
“Are they acolytes? studies? pensioners?” asks his aunt.
“Is the respectable one pretty?” murmurs Marlow. “The respectable ones so uncommonly rarely are!”
He takes the violets off the cloisonné plate.
“A buttonhole to be worn at Hoxton Theatre? It is an emblem of the immorality of finance: for its commercial value must be at least four farthings. If my Waterbury offend the eye of eternal justice this penny bunch must outrage it no less.”
“It is quite natural, I think,” says Cicely Seymour, rather impatiently, “that Mr. Bertram should have many friends in those classes which he considers so superior to his own.”
“I do not say any class is superior to any other,” interrupts Bertram. “I say that all are equal.”
There is now a great buzz of voices everywhere in the rooms; people are so very glad to have the muzzle off after an hour’s silence; he cannot doubt, as that murmur and trill of conversation run all round him, that he has bored them all excruciatingly.