world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-people
of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the
servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted. And the
Quality did it so quietly and thoroughly, the great house mingled so
solidly and effectually earth and sky, the contrast of its spacious
hall and saloon and galleries, its airy housekeeper's room and warren
of offices with the meagre dignities of the vicar, and the pinched and
stuffy rooms of even the post-office people and the grocer, so enforced
these suggestions, that it was only when I was a boy of thirteen or
fourteen and some queer inherited strain of scepticism had set me
doubting whether Mr. Bartlett, the vicar, did really know with certainty
all about God, that as a further and deeper step in doubting I began to
question the final rightness of the gentlefolks, their primary necessity
in the scheme of things. But once that scepticism had awakened it took
me fast and far. By fourteen I had achieved terrible blasphemies and
sacrilege; I had resolved to marry a viscount's daughter, and I had
blacked the left eye--I think it was the left--of her half-brother, in
open and declared rebellion.

But of that in its place.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and the
servants in their stations and degrees, seemed to me, I say, to be a
closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and
great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the
Gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere
collections of ships, marketing places for the tenantry, centres for
such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as
the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order
of the whole world. I thought London was only a greater country town