certainly never really entered into the English mind. But what IS coming
into it? All this book, I hope, will bear a little on that. Our people
never formulates; it keeps words for jests and ironies. In the meanwhile
the old shapes, the old attitudes remain, subtly changed and changing
still, sheltering strange tenants. Bladesover House is now let furnished
to Sir Reuben Lichtenstein, and has been since old Lady Drew died; it
was my odd experience to visit there, in the house of which my mother
had been housekeeper, when my uncle was at the climax of Tono-Bungay.
It was curious to notice then the little differences that had come to
things with this substitution. To borrow an image from my
mineralogical days, these Jews were not so much a new British gentry as
"pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very clever people, the
Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness. I wished I
could have gone downstairs to savour the tone of the pantry. It would
have been very different I know. Hawksnest, over beyond, I noted, had
its pseudomorph too; a newspaper proprietor of the type that hustles
along with stolen ideas from one loud sink-or-swim enterprise to
another, had bought the place outright; Redgrave was in the hands of
brewers.

But the people in the villages, so far as I could detect, saw no
difference in their world. Two little girls bobbed and an old labourer
touched his hat convulsively as I walked through the village. He still
thought he knew his place--and mine. I did not know him, but I would
have liked dearly to have asked him if he remembered my mother, if
either my uncle or old Lichtenstein had been man enough to stand being
given away like that.

In that English countryside of my boyhood every human being had a
"place." It belonged to you from your birth like the colour of your