was another peerage, with the covers off, in the pantry; there was a
new peerage in the billiard-room, and I seem to remember another in the
anomalous apartment that held the upper servants' bagatelle board and in
which, after the Hall dinner, they partook of the luxury of sweets. And
if you had asked any of those upper servants how such and such a Prince
of Battenberg was related to, let us say, Mr. Cunninghame Graham or
the Duke of Argyle, you would have been told upon the nail. As a boy, I
heard a great deal of that sort of thing, and if to this day I am
still a little vague about courtesy titles and the exact application of
honorifics, it is, I can assure you, because I hardened my heart, and
not from any lack of adequate opportunity of mastering these succulent
particulars.

Dominating all these memories is the figure of my mother--my mother who
did not love me because I grew liker my father every day--and who knew
with inflexible decision her place and the place of every one in the
world--except the place that concealed my father--and in some details
mine. Subtle points were put to her. I can see and hear her saying
now, "No, Miss Fison, peers of England go in before peers of the United
Kingdom, and he is merely a peer of the United Kingdom." She had much
exercise in placing people's servants about her tea-table, where the
etiquette was very strict. I wonder sometimes if the etiquette of
housekeepers' rooms is as strict to-day, and what my mother would have
made of a chauffeur....

On the whole I am glad that I saw so much as I did of Bladesover--if
for no other reason than because seeing it when I did, quite naively,
believing in it thoroughly, and then coming to analyse it, has enabled
me to understand much that would be absolutely incomprehensible in the
structure of English society. Bladesover is, I am convinced, the clue to