family prestige, or the right kind of social personality with the best
kind of letters. We just crept in and were glad to be permitted to make a
living. Why should they have taken any notice of us? They don't go hunting
about for obscure people of possibly gentle blood. That doesn't happen
anywhere in the world. You must be reasonable, my dear child. That is life,
'The World.'"

But Gora was not gifted with that form of reasonableness. She had wished in
her darker moments that she had been born outright in the working-class;
then, no doubt, she would have trudged contentedly every morning (except
when on strike) to the factory or shop, or been some one's cook. She was an
excellent cook. What galled her was the fact of virtually belonging to the
same class as these people who were still unaware of the existence of her
family, although it had lived for over thirty years in a city numbering
to-day only half a million inhabitants.

She was almost fanatically democratic and could see no reason for
differences of degree in the aspiring classes. To her mind the only line of
cleavage between the classes was that which divided people of education,
refinement of mind manners and habits, certain inherited traditions, and
the mental effort no matter how small to win a place in this difficult
world, from commonness, ignorance, indifference to dirt, coarse pleasures.
and habits, and manual labor. She respected Labor as the solid foundation
stones upon which civilization upheld itself, and believed it to have been
biologically chosen; if she had been born in its class she would have had
the ambition to work her way out of it, but without resentment.

There her recognition of class stopped. That wealth or family prominence
even in a great city or an old community should create an exclusive and
favored society seemed to her illogical and outrageous. A woman was a lady