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Then Mary laughed long and merrily, the first good, hearty laugh since the beginning of her teaching. "Tell me," Mary broke out, suddenly, "or the suspense will kill me, who wrote that lovely letter—on such good quality Irish linen, too? Snob that I was, it was the letter that did it." "So you have your suspicions that it was not a home product?" "You didn’t do it, did you?"
She was small and slight, and the black was made smart by touches of white crepe. Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman with a firm conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified standards of living. She was in no sense a snob.
It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth. I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees.
In the character of Becky Sharp, he has marshaled some of his own weak points and then lashed them with scorn. He looked into the mirror and seeing a potential snob he straightway inveighed against snobbery. The punishment does not always fit the crime it is excess. But I still contest that where his ridicule is most severe, it is Thackeray's own back that is bared to the knout.
A Snob she is, as long as she sets that prodigious value upon herself, upon her name, upon her outward appearance, and indulges in that intolerable pomposity; as long as she goes parading abroad, like Solomon in all his glory; as long as she goes to bed as I believe she does with a turban and a bird of paradise in it, and a court train to her night-gown; as long as she is so insufferably virtuous and condescending; as long as she does not cut at least one of those footmen down into mutton-chops for the benefit of the young ladies.
But promotion breeds conceit only in base natures. The greyhound is a gentleman, respectful and self-respecting, and it shows that by the very carriage of its tail. Only a snob at heart, petted and pampered for many generations, could have produced that perfect incarnation of smug self-satisfaction, the pug. Let us take the lesson home.
Snuffler no longer publicly spreads out his great red cotton pocket-handkerchief before the fire, for the admiration of two hundred gentlemen; and if one Club Snob has been brought back to the paths of rectitude, and if one poor John has been spared a journey or a scolding say, friends and brethren if these sketches of Club Snobs have been in vain?
How much finer, simpler, nobler are the several employments I have sketched out for these gentlemen than their present nightly orgies at the horrid Club. Chubb and burning down Club-houses in St. James's, there is ONE Snob at who will not think the worse of you. The only men who, as I opine, ought to be allowed the use of Clubs, are married men without a profession.
Certainly not, unless I am less a man for having once been a baby. It is only when I am unusually cross and irritable that I object to being reminded of my infancy. But a young child does not like to be reminded of it. He is afraid that some one will take him for a baby still. And the snob is always desperately afraid that some one will fail to notice what a high-born gentleman he is.
Let this attraction to what is gracious in appearance, however, be kept distinct from the effect made by the spectacle of wealth upon the snob. Those who show us the beauty in the world, enrich the world with that much of beauty. In his Life and Letters of Charles Keene, Mr. G.S. Layard says this:
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