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For aristocrats of to-day belong only partly to tradition, in that they live in the present. Whereas a fifteenth century law belongs to the fifteenth century and to no other period. To obey law as understood by the ancient sociologists, did not mean obeying Scipio who has just passed us on the Via Sacra. It meant to obey his grandfather's great grandfather! All this is ultra-aristocratic.
Her city home, in Fifth Avenue, was so magnificent, so chastely restrained and sober, so sternly dignified, that it set the cue for half the other homes of the ultra-aristocratic set.
The elder of these Counts Hohenau bears the name of Fritz, and his wife, before their banishment from the capital, was one of the most dashing and brilliant figures in the ultra-aristocratic society of Berlin.
Their father was a very rich iron-master, a self-made man, who had been created a Baronet and had married an ultra-aristocratic woman, the beautiful Miss Enid Blensover, related to half the Peerage. The blend had resulted in the two girls, who were certainly anything rather than ordinary.
And they all collected Impressionist pictures, read decadent books, and prided themselves on a taste for some ultra-aristocratic art, which was almost always in direct opposition to their ideas. It puzzled Christophe to find these Socialist or Radical-Socialist Ministers, these apostles of the poor and down-trodden, posing as connoisseurs of eclectic art.
Every man jack of them was trying to unload his stock-in-trade. The most thriving of them were naturally the nostrum-mongers, the philosophical lecturers who ladled out general ideas, leavened with a few facts, a scientific smattering, and cosmological conclusions. The Popular Universities were also an outlet for the ultra-aristocratic works of art: decadent etchings, poetry, and music.
Clearly the circumstances required a cooler head than that possessed by Flaccus; and there was the threat of a still further danger which rendered Gracchus's presence a necessity. The consulship for the following year was likely to be gained by one of the most stalwart champions of ultra-aristocratic views.
As to the two aunts, they were as tall and thin as a couple of willow-rods, pale, discreet, ultra-aristocratic in their reserve and their coldness; but they bore in their faces an expression of happy peace and sentimental tenderness, such as is often seen in old maids whose temper has not been soured by celibacy.
Lady Durwent's dinner-party had been an expedition into the artistic fakery of London, and he would have dismissed the whole affair as a stimulating and amusing diversion from the ultra-aristocratic rut if the personality of Elise Durwent had not remained with him like a haunting melody. He looked at his watch.
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