were discreet men, who kept the secret.

The door leading to the antechamber was wide open, and the Baroness
went on deliberately, looking about through her hand-glass, in the
half light, for the shutters were not all open. Dust everywhere, the
dust that falls silently at night from the ancient wooden ceilings and
painted beams of Roman palaces, the dust of centuries accumulated
above and sifting for ever to the floors below. It was on the yellow
marble pier tables, on the dim mirrors in their eighteenth century
frames, on the high canopy draped with silver and black beneath which
the effigy of another big cheeky eagle seemed to be silently moulting
under his antique crown, the emblem of a race that had lived almost on
the same spot for eight hundred years, through good and bad repute,
but in nearly uninterrupted prosperity. The Baroness, who hankered
after greatness, felt that the gloom was a twilight of gods. She stood
still before the canopy, the symbol of princely rank and privilege,
the invisible silk bellows were silent for a few seconds, and she
wondered whether there were any procurable sum which she and her
husband would grudge in exchange for the acknowledged right to display
a crowned eagle, cheeky, argent and sable, in their hall, under a
canopy draped with their own colours. She sighed, since no one could
hear her, and she went on. The sigh was not only for the hopelessness
of ever reaching such social greatness; it was in part the outward
show of a real regret that it should have come to an untimely end. Her
admiration of princes was as sincere as her longing to be one of them;
she had at least the melancholy satisfaction of sympathizing with them
in their downfall. It brought her a little nearer to them in
imagination if not in fact.

The evolution of the snob has been going on quickly of late, and