“She continually asks the P-Cliffords to ask Eris over. Eris goes occasionally. I asked her point-blank why that peevish old party was so amiable to her, and she blushed in that engagingly confused way and said that your aunt knew her great grandmother.
“Apparently there was quality in the forebears of Eris, or that dumpy old snob wouldn’t have made any fuss over the great grandchild of somebody who died years and years ago.”
CHAPTER XVI
ANNAN was in a way of being rather pleased with himself. Nobody can remain entirely unshaken by the impact of the sort of flattery hurled in hunks by the Great American Ass.
For with him it is all or nothing, repletion or starvation.
Also, unlike his French and British brothers, he is a disloyal ass. Also a capricious one. There is no respect in him for past performance once lauded. The established favourite grown old in service sooner or later becomes a target for his heels.
This is not heartlessness; it is ignorance of what has been done for him and of those who have done it.
For he really is the most sentimental of asses. Sentiment and temper are the two outlets for the uneducated. They are his. Convince the Great American Ass that his behaviour is callous, capricious, cruel, and he’d asphyxiate his victim in sentimental saliva.
For this secretion foams up from the Centre of Population and oozes in all directions. It is the solvent for the repulsive, the ugly, the sordid, offered in the pill of Art by Modernism.
But what, exactly, this pill is going to do to the Great American Ass is still a social and pathological problem.