THE BIRTHPLACE
northern castle, and that was the way the housekeeper had taken them round. And it was not moreover, either, that she thought of herself as a housekeeper: she was well above that, and the wave of her hand wouldn't fail to be such as to show it. This, and much else, she summed up as she answered her mate. "Our special advantages are that you're a gentleman."
"Oh!" said Gedge, as if he had never thought of it, and yet as if too it were scarce worth thinking of.
"I see it all," she went on; "they've had the vulgar—they find they don't do. We're poor and we're modest, but anyone can see what we are."
Gedge wondered. "Do you mean———?" More modest than she, he didn't know quite what she meant.
"We're refined. We know how to speak."
"Do we?"—he still, suddenly, wondered.
But she was, from the first, surer of everything than he; so that when a few weeks more had elapsed and the shade of uncertainty—though it was only a shade—had grown almost to sicken him, her triumph was to come with the news that they were fairly named. "We're on poor pay, though we manage"—she had on the present occasion insisted on her point. "But we're highly cultivated, and for them to get that, don't you see? without getting too much with it in the way of pretentions and demands, must be precisely their dream. We've no social position, but we don't mind that we haven't, do we? a bit; which is because we know the difference between realities and shams. We hold to reality, and that gives us common sense, which the vulgar have less than anything, and which yet must be wanted there, after all, as well as anywhere else."
Her companion followed her, but musingly, as if his horizon had within a few moments grown so great that he was almost lost in it and required a new orientation. The shining spaces surrounded him; the association alone gave a nobler arch to the sky. "Allow that we
249
