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.
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