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Lady Latimer had not come into the Forest until some years after the Reverend Geoffry Fairfax's death, and she had no knowledge of Bessie's birth, parentage and connections; but she had a principle against poor women pining in the shadow of gentility when they could help themselves by honest endeavors; and also, she had a plan for raising the quality of National School teaching by introducing into the ranks of the teachers young gentlewomen unprovided by fortune.
Ring as often as it might, the sound always smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now, while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination to confront a customer. "Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin!" cried Phoebe, starting lightly up. "I am shop-keeper to-day."
Elizabeth had long known that her mistress "kept a shop," and with the notions of gentility which are just as rife in her class as in any other, had mourned bitterly over this fact.
I might as well have inherited a hornet's nest. It was a legacy-of hate! The old patroon must have chuckled in his grave! One night they called with the intention of hanging me." "My dear sir, I congratulate you!" exclaimed the nobleman enthusiastically. "Thanks!" Dryly. "It is the test of gentility. They only hang or cut off the heads of people of distinction nowadays."
Although there were several families in the village which had a claim to equal gentility, their daughters somehow felt that they failed to make good that claim in Desire's presence. They owned, though they found less flattering terms in which to express it, the same air of distinction and dainty aloofness about her, which the farmers' daughters, too humble for jealousy, so admiringly admitted.
They are, in cold fact, what Dickens describes: "a dustbin of individual accidents," of damaged dignity, and often of damaged gentility. The class very largely consists of perfectly promising children, lost like Oliver Twist, or crippled like Tiny Tim. It contains very valuable things, like most dustbins.
Phoebe had been safeguarded all her short life by her notions of gentility and by her fear, the fear, not of consequences, but, less base than that, the fear of actual passion, which is often implanted in very passionate girls as though to guard them till the time comes.
The Bohemian requires no prescribed rules, for his or her innate gentility prevents those things Society guards against. In Bohemia men and women mingle in good fellowship and camaraderie without finding the sex question a necessary topic of conversation. They do not find it necessary to push exhilaration to intoxication; to increase their animation to boisterousness.
I soon turned the conversation toward America, a theme which I knew would be interesting, and upon which I could be fluent and agreeable. I strove to talk in Addisonian English, and ere long could see very plainly that my polished phrases were making a surprising impression, though that miserable shooting-jacket of mine was a perpetual drawback to my claims to gentility.
Flamson, call him genteel? and gentility with them is everything! Assuredly they would not; and assuredly they would consider him respectively as a being to be shunned, despised, or hooted. Genteel! Why at one time he is a hack author writes reviewals for eighteenpence a page edits a Newgate chronicle.
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