gs takes place in so many directions, it was
positively refreshing to turn to Lady Chaloner, who not only did not
know, but could not conceive that it mattered, what other people did in
any layer of existence beneath her own. She had not at any time a keen
eye to discrimination of character. Her judgment of those
fellow-creatures whom she naturally frequented was based in the first
instance on their degree of blood relationship with herself, then on
their social standing: but she was but vaguely aware of the difference
between the men and women, especially the women, who did not belong to
that inner circle, and knew as little about them as a looker-on leaning
from a window in a foreign town knows about the people who pass beneath
him in the street. But there were times when she entirely recognised
the usefulness in the scheme of creation of those motley crowds of
well-dressed persons, even though they bore names she had never heard
before. During her preparation for the bazaar, for instance, which she
was getting up in the single-minded conviction that nothing better could
be done for the institution she was trying to befriend, she had been
more than willing to co-operate with Mrs. Birkett, the wife of the
chaplain, and even to ask some of Mrs. Birkett's friends for their help.
Mrs. Birkett, who approached the bazaar from the point of view from
which she had artlessly imagined it was being undertaken, that of
ensuring some sort of provision for the expenses of the chaplain who
undertook the summer duty of Schleppenheim, received a series of shocks
as she came face to face with the different points of view of the
various stall-holders with whom she was successively brought into
contact. Lady Chaloner--she looked on this as a great achievement--had
succeeded in enrolling among the bazaar-workers the young Princess
Hohenschreien, on the ground of her being a staunch Protestant. The
Princess was half-English, half-German. Her mother had been a distant
connection of Lady Chaloner. This relationship in some strange way
entirely condoned in Lady Chaloner's eyes the fact that the Princess
Hohenschreien had a good deal of paint on her face, and a good deal of
paint in her manner, and that the loudness of her laugh and the boldness
of her bearing were more pronounced than would have been permitted of
the well-behaved ladies brought up within the walls of Castle Chaloner.
However, Lady Chaloner's daughters were married to husbands o