Any man who says that he is a gentleman is not a gentleman. A gentleman
no more tells you that he is a gentleman than a brave man tells you he
is brave. Gentility is a quality which the possessor never seeks to
establish as his own by word of mouth; he leaves it to inference and the
rule has no exception. This brilliant speechlessness arises not through
modesty, but ignorance. However clearly gentility reveals itself to
others, he who possesses it has no more knowledge on that faultless
point than have your hills of the yellow gold they hold within their
breasts.

Storri was one who went far and frequently out of his conversational way
to assure you that he was a gentleman. Though he did no more than just
recount how he gave his seat to a woman in a car, or passed the salt at
dinner, or made a morning call, somewhere in the narrative you were sure
to hear that he was "a gentleman," or "a Russian gentleman," commonly
the latter; and he always accompanied the news with a straightening of
his heavy shoulders and a threatening pull at his mustache as though he
expected to find his word disputed and planned a terrible return.

It could not be called Storri's fault that it was not three hundred
years since his forebears wore sheepskins, carried clubs, and made a
fire by judiciously rubbing one stick against another. None the less,
this nearness to a stone age left him barbarous in his heart; and the
layer of civilization that was upon him was not a layer, but a polish--a
sheen, and neither so thick nor so tangible as moonshine on a lake. The
savageries of Richard were quite as vivid as Storri's, perhaps; but at
least they had been advantageously hidden beneath a top-dressing of
eleven civilizing centuries instead of three; and those eight extra
centuries made all the difference in life. They gave Richard steadiness