different grand piano with a painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and
an extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scattered
about. There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The
furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of chintz
although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling chandeliers had
passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes I
had browsed among--they were mostly presentation copies of contemporary
novels and the National Review and the Empire Review, and the Nineteenth
Century and after jostled current books on the tables--English new books
in gaudy catchpenny "artistic" covers, French and Italian novels in
yellow, German art handbooks of almost incredible ugliness. There
were abundant evidences that her ladyship was playing with the
Keltic renascence, and a great number of ugly cats made of china--she
"collected" china and stoneware cats--stood about everywhere--in all
colours, in all kinds of deliberately comic, highly glazed distortion.

It is nonsense to pretend that finance makes any better aristocrats than
rent. Nothing can make an aristocrat but pride, knowledge, training, and
the sword. These people were no improvement on the Drews, none whatever.
There was no effect of a beneficial replacement of passive unintelligent
people by active intelligent ones. One felt that a smaller but more
enterprising and intensely undignified variety of stupidity had replaced
the large dullness of the old gentry, and that was all. Bladesover, I
thought, had undergone just the same change between the seventies and
the new century that had overtaken the dear old Times, and heaven knows
how much more of the decorous British fabric. These Lichtensteins and
their like seem to have no promise in them at all of any fresh vitality
for the kingdom. I do not believe in their intelligence or their
power--they have nothing new about them at all, nothing creative nor
rejuvenescent, no more than a disorderly instinct of acquisition; and