Page:The common reader.djvu/287

OUTLINES

But all the time the door of the cage was ajar. Raids were made into what Mr. Nevill calls “Upper Bohemia”; from which Lady Dorothy returned with “authors, journalists, actors, actresses, or other agreeable and amusing people”. Lady Dorothy’s judgement is proved by the fact that they seldom misbehaved, and some indeed became quite domesticated, and wrote her “very gracefully turned letters”. But once or twice she made a flight beyond the cage herself. “These horrors”, she said, alluding to the middle class, “are so clever and we are so stupid; but then look how well they are educated, while our children learn nothing but how to spend their parents’ money!” She brooded over the fact. Something was going wrong. She was too shrewd and too honest not to lay the blame partly at least upon her own class. “I suppose she can just about read?” she said of one lady calling herself cultured; and of another, “She is indeed curious and well adapted to open bazaars.” But to our thinking her most remarkable flight took place a year or two before her death, in the Victoria and Albert Museum:

I do so agree with you, she wrote—though I ought not to say so—that the upper class are very—I don’t know what to say—but they seem to take no interest in anything—but golfing, etc. One day I was at the Victoria and Albert Museum, just a few sprinkles of legs, for I am sure they looked too frivolous to have bodies and souls attached to them—but what softened the sight to my eyes were 2 little Japs poring over each article with a handbook . . . our bodies, of course, gig-

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