“One thing always strikes me,” said Kate. “The sentence of stupefaction does not seem to be enforced till after five-and-twenty. That young lady we just met looked quite lively and juvenile last year, I remember, and now she has graduated into a dowager.”
“Like little Helen’s kitten,” said Philip. “She justly remarks that, since I saw it last, it is all spoiled into a great big cat.”
“Those must be snobs,” said Harry, as a carriage with unusually gorgeous liveries rolled by.
“I suppose so,” said Malbone, indifferently. “In Oldport we call all new-comers snobs, you know, till they have invited us to their grand ball. Then we go to it, and afterwards speak well of them, and only abuse their wine.”
“How do you know them for new-comers?” asked Hope, looking after the carriage.
“By their improperly intelligent expression,” returned Phil. “They look around them as you do, my child, with the air of wide-awake curiosity which marks the American traveller. That is out of place here. The Avenue abhors everything but a vacuum.”
“I never can find out,” continued Hope, “how people recognize each other here. They do not look at each other, unless they know each other: and how are they to know if they know, unless they look first?”
“It seems an embarrassment,” said Malbone. “But it is supposed that fashion perforates the eyelids and looks through. If you attempt it in any other way, you are lost. Newly arrived people look about them, and, the more new wealth they have, the more they gaze. The men are uneasy behind their recently educated mustaches, and the women hold their parasols with trembling hands. It takes two years to learn to drive on the Avenue. Come again next summer, and you will see in those same carriages faces of remote superciliousness, that suggest generations of gout and ancestors.”
“What a pity one feels,” said Harry, “for these people who still suffer from lingering modesty, and need a master to teach them to be insolent!”
“They learn it soon enough,” said Kate. “Philip is right. Fashion lies in the eye. People fix their own position by the way they don’t look at you.”