Demos | Page 9

very little room, which made a kind of boudoir for Adela. Alfred struck a match and lit a lamp, disclosing a nest of wonderful purity and neatness. On the table a drawing-board was slanted; it showed a text of Scripture in process of 'illumination.'
'Still at that kind of thing!' exclaimed Alfred. 'My good child, if you want to paint, why don't you paint in earnest? Really, Adela, I must enter a protest! Remember that you are eighteen years of age.'
'I don't forget it, Alfred.'
'At eight-and-twenty, at eight-and-thirty, you propose still to be at the same stage of development?'
'I don't think we'll talk of it,' said the girl quietly. 'We don't understand each other.'
'Of course not, but we might, if only you'd read sensible books that I could give you.'
Adela shook her head. The philosophical youth sank into his favourite attitude--legs extended, hands in pockets, nose in air.
'So, I suppose,' he said presently, 'that fellow really has been ill?'
Adela was sitting in thought; she looked up with a shadow of annoyance on her face.
'That fellow?'
'Eldon, you know.'
'I want to ask you a question,' said his sister, interlocking her fingers and pressing them against her throat. 'Why do you always speak in a contemptuous way of Mr. Eldon?'
'You know I don't like the individual.'
'What cause has "the individual" given you?'
'He's a snob.'
'I'm not sure that I know what that means,' replied Adela, after thinking for a moment with downcast eyes.
'Because you never read anything. He's a fellow who raises a great edifice of pretence on rotten foundations.'
'What can you mean? Mr. Eldon is a gentleman. What pretence is he guilty of?'
'Gentleman!' uttered her brother with much scorn. 'Upon my word, that is the vulgarest of denominations! Who doesn't call himself so nowadays! A man's a man, I take it, and what need is there to lengthen the name? Thank the powers, we don't live in feudal ages. Besides, he doesn't seem to me to be what you imply.'
Adela had taken a book; in turning over the pages, she said--
'No doubt you mean, Alfred, that, for some reason, you are determined to view him with prejudice.'
'The reason is obvious enough. The fellow's behaviour is detestable; he looks at you from head to foot as if you were applying for a place in his stable. Whenever I want an example of a contemptible aristocrat, there's Eldon ready-made. Contemptible, because he's such a sham; as if everybody didn't know his history and his circumstances!'
'Everybody doesn't regard them as you do. There is nothing whatever dishonourable in his position.'
'Not in sponging on a rich old plebeian, a man he despises, and living in idleness at his expense?'
'I don't believe Mr. Eldon does anything of the kind. Since his brother's death he has had a sufficient income of his own, so mother says.'
'Sufficient income of his own! Bah! Five or six hundred a year; likely he lives on that! Besides, haven't they soaped old Mutimer into leaving them all his property? The whole affair is the best illustration one could possibly have of what aristocrats are brought to in a democratic age. First of all, Godfrey Eldon marries Mutimer's daughter; you are at liberty to believe, if you like, that he would have married her just the same if she hadn't had a penny. The old fellow is flattered. They see the hold they have, and stick to him like leeches. All for want of money, of course. Our aristocrats begin to see that they can't get on without money nowadays; they can't live on family records, and they find that people won't toady to them in the old way just on account of their name. Why, it began with Eldon's father--didn't he put his pride in his pocket, and try to make cash by speculation? Now I can respect him: he at all events faced the facts of the case honestly. The despicable thing in this Hubert Eldon is that, having got money once more, and in the dirtiest way, he puts on the top-sawyer just as if there was nothing to be ashamed of. If he and his mother were living in a small way on their few hundreds a year, he might haw-haw as much as he liked, and I should only laugh at him; he'd be a fool, but an honest one. But catch them doing that! Family pride's too insubstantial a thing, you see. Well, as I said, they illustrate the natural course of things, the transition from the old age to the new. If Eldon has sons, they'll go in for commerce, and make themselves, if they can, millionaires; but by that time they'll dispense with airs and insolence--see if they don't.'
Adela kept her eyes on the pages before her, but she was listening intently. A sort of verisimilitude in the