unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and lives
crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession
of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what has set me at last
writing something in the nature of a novel. I have got an unusual series
of impressions that I want very urgently to tell. I have seen life at
very different levels, and at all these levels I have seen it with a
sort of intimacy and in good faith. I have been a native in many social
countries. I have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my
cousin, who has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten
illegal snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries,
and been despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and
divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my other
extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the house-party
of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a financial aspect, but
still, you know, a countess. I've seen these people at various angles.
At the dinner-table I've met not simply the titled but the great. On
one occasion--it is my brightest memory--I upset my champagne over the
trousers of the greatest statesman in the empire--Heaven forbid I should
be so invidious as to name him!--in the warmth of our mutual admiration.

And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered
a man....

Yes, I've seen a curious variety of people and ways of living
altogether. Odd people they all are great and small, very much alike at
bottom and curiously different on their surfaces. I wish I had ranged
just a little further both up and down, seeing I have ranged so far.
Royalty must be worth knowing and very great fun. But my contacts with
princes have been limited to quite public occasions, nor at the other
end of the scale have I had what I should call an inside acquaintance