Manchurian Books

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
where the gentle-folk kept town-houses and did their greater shopping
under the magnificent shadow of the greatest of all fine gentlewomen,
the Queen. It seemed to be in the divine order.


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