almost all that is distinctively British and perplexing to the foreign
inquirer in England and the English-speaking peoples. Grasp firmly that
England was all Bladesover two hundred years ago; that it has had
Reform Acts indeed, and such--like changes of formula, but no essential
revolution since then; that all that is modern and different has come in
as a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula, either
impertinently or apologetically; and you will perceive at once the
reasonableness, the necessity, of that snobbishness which is the
distinctive quality of English thought. Everybody who is not actually in
the shadow of a Bladesover is as it were perpetually seeking after
lost orientations. We have never broken with our tradition, never even
symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact
in the Terror. But all the organizing ideas have slackened, the old
habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone. And America
too, is, as it were, a detached, outlying part of that estate which
has expanded in queer ways. George Washington, Esquire, was of the
gentlefolk, and he came near being a King. It was Plutarch, you know,
and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington
being a King....

IV

I hated teatime in the housekeeper's room more than anything else at
Bladesover. And more particularly I hated it when Mrs. Mackridge and
Mrs. Booch and Mrs. Latude-Fernay were staying in the house. They were,
all three of them, pensioned-off servants.

Old friends of Lady Drew's had rewarded them posthumously for a
prolonged devotion to their minor comforts, and Mrs. Booch was also
trustee for a favourite Skye terrier. Every year Lady Drew gave them an