t home. If people are nice in themselves how can it matter
who they are or if "fashionable" or not. The whole thing is nonsense and if
you belong to a country where the longest tradition is sixteen hundred and
something, and your ancestor got there then through being a middle class
puritan, or a ne'er-do-weel shipped off to colonise a savage land, it is
too absurd to boast about ancestry or worry in the least over such things.
The facts to be proud of are the splendid, vivid, vital, successful
creatures they are now, no matter what their origin; but just like
Hurstbridge and Ermyntrude in the nursery, the one thing they can't have
they think immensely of. Nearly everyone tells you here, their
great-great-grandfather came over in the Mayflower. (How absurd of the
Cunard line to be proud of the Mauretania! The Mayflower, of course, must
have been twice the size.) I wonder if in Virginia they would inform us
theirs were the original cavaliers. I don't expect so, because cavaliers
always were gentlemen, and puritans of any century only of the middle
classes. Fancy if we had to announce to strangers that Tom's ancestor
carried the standard at Agincourt and Octavia's and mine came over with the
Conqueror!

Even in a week Tom has got so wearied about the Mayflower that yesterday at
lunch when some new people came, and one woman began again, he said his
father had collected rags and bones, and his great-great-grandfather was
hung for sheep stealing! The woman nearly had a fit, and I heard her
reproaching our hostess afterwards, as she said she had been invited to
meet an English Earl! And the poor hostess looked so unhappy and came and
asked me in such a worried voice if it were really true; so I told her I
thought not exactly, but that the late Earl had a wonderful collection of
Persian carpets and ivories which Tom might be alluding to. Even this did
not comfort her, I could see she was still troubled over the sheep
stealing, and the only thing I could think of to explain that was about the
eighth Earl, don't you remember, Mamma? who was beheaded for the Old
Pretender.

But the exquisite part of it all is the lady Tom told the story to was
interviewed directly she got home, I suppose, for this morning in most of
the papers there are headlines six inches tall:

ENGLISH PEER NO CATCH

FATHER RAG AND BONE MERCHANT

GRANDFATHER HANGED

Tom is so enchanted he is going to have them framed for the smoking room at
Chevenix. Bu