If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to foot to
see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not grown a little
older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice, or if your
complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then convey the fact to
you, in the style in which the Poor Relation addressed the
divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like. I hate the sight of
the wretches. Don't for mercy's sake think I hate them; the distinction
is one my friend or I drew long ago. No matter where you find such
people; they are clowns.
The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a lady
as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when she has
to say something which offends her natural sense of good manners, has a
hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood of old Milesian
kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned by two hundred years
of potato, which, being an underground fruit, tends to drag down the
generations that are made of it to the earth from which it came, and,
filling their veins with starch, turn them into a kind of human
vegetable.
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