s big silver-adorned,
chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the
beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd
exceptional little wrangle.

At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for
me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that
Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and reality again."

"But aren't these people real?"

"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"

I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so extravagant?"
I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any
other woman's in the house.

"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale and
spirit of things."

I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before her
out of the window.

I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also
Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.
"You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy girl. Every
one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like
something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to
me."

"Offensive things?"

"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right.
That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all
that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none
of the others make the slightest objection to him."

"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."

"That's just it," said Margaret.

"Charity," I suggested.

"I don't like that sort of toleration."

I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I said.
"No!..."

But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's their
whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy
against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit at dinner
in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and
candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its
candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the
over-crowded cottages stuffed away under th