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"Our best little society climber, the Honorable Robert Laird," returned the speaker, and reverted to his inspirational pen-picture: "Runs home to wifie and crows, 'What do you think, my dear! Junior Masters called me 'Bob' to-day!" In a flash, the murderous quality of the thing bit into Banneker's sensitive brain. "Junior Masters called me 'Bob' to-day." The apotheosis of snobbery!
There was no taint of snobbery in her simple, kindly disposition, and when her late husband, a distinguished military officer, had been knighted for special and splendid service in the war, she had only deplored that the ruin of his health and disablement by wounds, prevented him from taking any personal pleasure in the "honour."
The man will have to look for a position his sister cannot fill, and, judging from the present aspect of London, those positions are rapidly disappearing. That in the ornamental jobs, those that are relics of feudalism and snobbery, women should supplant men is not surprising. To wear gold lace and touch your hat and whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a mechanical one, is no difficult task.
In families where an ambition has been aroused, the visitor should foster it by making connection with some such educational agencies. There is a very obvious form of snobbery that we are quick enough to detect, the snobbery that looks down on people who have to work hard and wear shabby clothes.
People who regard literary taste simply as an accomplishment, and literature simply as a distraction, will never truly succeed either in acquiring the accomplishment or in using it half-acquired as a distraction; though the one is the most perfect of distractions, and though the other is unsurpassed by any other accomplishment in elegance or in power to impress the universal snobbery of civilised mankind.
The writer will always hold it a privilege that he had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh a remnant of the men who laid the foundation of the institutions by means of which this great Commonwealth has grown and prospered; big, broad-minded, strong men who, whatever their failings for they were very human were generous to a fault, ever ready to listen to the cry of distress or help a fallen brother to his feet, scornful of pettiness, ignorant of snobbery, fair and square in their dealings with their fellows.
But an even more dangerous form of snobbery, because not so obvious, is the intellectual form, which claims an exclusive right to culture, and looks down upon the simple and unsophisticated. The fact is, that, save for a very gifted few, we are all of us dependent upon the gifts of others for what we know and what we enjoy.
Even Thackeray's Argus eye could not have detected a grain of snobbery in him.
And if it will hasten the emancipation of the American man from the thralldom of snobbery still another barrier will go down in the path of the average woman. Just consider for a moment how many men are failures.
She picked at the darned table-cloth and went on: "You look as if you knew what isn't snobbery as well as what is; and when I say that ours is a good old family, you'll understand it is a necessary part of the story; indeed, my chief danger is in my brother's high-and-dry notions, noblesse oblige and all that.
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