re
cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; her
bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies. Richness,
that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like to
convey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that old
Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dear
old mother in soda for a month you couldn't have got her so clean
as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading all
her presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence
in the respectful subordination of the world.

She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any
loss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she
had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had
bridged the gulf between their families.

And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far
as my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world
that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling
inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed
for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things
that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one
had taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and
indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human
beings--the Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had
been in either country a nobility--it was and remains a common
error that the British peers were noble--neither in law nor custom
were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification
one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peerage
was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned
only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse
oblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common--and
all America was common. But through the private ownership of land
that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain
and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large
masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands
of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new
public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by
any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy
of common interests and a common large scale of living. It was a class
without any very definite boundaries; vigorous