effect of home influence, indeed, constitutes with most of us a sort of
secondary heredity, interweaving with, and sometimes almost
indistinguishable from, the real unalterable primary heredity, a moral
shaping by suggestion, example, and influence, that is a sort of
spiritual parallel to physical procreation.

It is not simply personalities that are operative in the home
influence. There is also the implications of the various relations
between one member of the home circle and another. I am inclined to
think that the social conceptions, for example, that are accepted in a
child's home world are very rarely shaken in afterlife. People who have
been brought up in households where there is an organized under-world
of servants are incurably different in their social outlook from those
who have passed a servantless childhood. They never quite emancipate
themselves from the conception of an essential class difference, of a
class of beings inferior to themselves. They may theorise about
equality--but theory is not belief. They will do a hundred things to
servants that between equals would be, for various reasons, impossible.
The Englishwoman and the Anglicised American woman of the more
pretentious classes honestly regards a servant as physically, morally,
and intellectually different from herself, capable of things that would
be incredibly arduous to a lady, capable of things that would be
incredibly disgraceful, under obligations of conduct no lady observes,
incapable of the refinement to which every lady pretends. It is one of
the most amazing aspects of contemporary life, to converse with some
smart, affected, profoundly uneducated, flirtatious woman about her
housemaid's followers. There is such an identity; there is such an
abyss. But at present that contrast is not our concern. Our concern at
present is with the fact that the social constitution of the home
almost invariably shapes the fundamental social conceptions for life,