Manchurian Books

Three
ladies and the curate played croquet with a general immense gravity,
broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate.
"Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!"
The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she took up a
certain position commanding the croquet and went on, as my aunt said to
me in an incidental aside, "like an old Roundabout." She talked of the
way in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on to
a touching letter she had recently received from her former nurse at
Little Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how much
she and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. "My poor mother
was quite a little Queen there," she said. "And such NICE Common people!
People say the country labourers are getting disrespectful nowadays. It
isn't so--not if they're properly treated. Here of course in Beckenham
it's different. I won't call the people we get here a Poor--they're
certainly not a proper Poor. They're Masses. I always tell Mr. Bugshoot
they're Masses, and ought to be treated as such.


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