Pomonas Travels | Page 4

a house of our own as good as most rectors
have over here, and money enough to hire a minor canon, if we needed
one in the house; but the people over here don't know that, and it
wouldn't make much difference if they did, for it wouldn't matter how
nice we lived or what we had so long as they knew we was retired
servants."
At this Jone just blazed up and rammed his hands into his pockets and
spread his feet wide upon the floor. "Pomona," said he, "I don't mind it
in you, but if anybody else was to call me a retired servant I'd--"
"Hold up, Jone," said I, "don't waste good, wholesome anger." Now, I
tell you, madam, it really did me good to see Jone blaze up and get red
in the face, and I am sure that if he'd get his blood boiling oftener it
would be a good thing for his dyspeptic tendencies and what little
malaria may be left in his system. "It won't do any good to flare up
here," I went on to say to him; "fact's fact, and we was servants, and
good ones, too, though I say it myself, and the trouble is we haven't got
into the way of altogether forgetting it, or, at least, acting as if we had
forgotten it."
Jone sat down on a chair. "It might help matters a little," he said, "if I
knew what you was driving at."
"I mean just this," said I, "as long as we are as anxious not to give
trouble, or as careful of people's feelings, as good-mannered to servants,
and as polite and good-natured to everybody we have anything to do
with, as we both have been since we came here, and as it is our nature
to be, I am proud to say, we're bound to be set down, at least by the
general run of people over here, as belonging to the pick of the nobility
and gentry, or as well-bred servants. It's only those two classes that act

as we do, and anybody can see we are not special nobles and gents.
Now, if we want to be reckoned anywhere in between these two we've
got to change our manners."
"Will you kindly mention just how?" said Jone.
"Yes," said I, "I will. In the first place, we've got to act as if we had
always been waited on and had never been satisfied with the way it was
done; we've got to let people think that we think we are a good deal
better than they are, and what they think about it doesn't make the least
difference; and then again we've got to live in better quarters than these,
and whatever they may be we must make people think that we don't
think they are quite good enough for us. If we do all that, agents may
be willing to let us vicarages."
"It strikes me," said Jone, "that these quarters are good enough for us.
I'm comfortable." And then he went on to say, madam, that when you
and your husband was in London you was well satisfied with just such
lodgings.
"That's all very well," I said, "for they never moved in the lower paths
of society, and so they didn't have to make any change, but just went
along as they had been used to go. But if we want to make people
believe we belong to that class I should choose, if I had my pick out of
English social varieties, we've got to bounce about as much above it as
we were born below it, so that we can strike somewhere near the proper
average."
"And what variety would you pick out, I'd like to know?" said Jone,
just a little red in the face, and looking as if I had told him he didn't
know timothy hay from oat straw.
"Well," said I, "it is not easy to put it to you exactly, but it's a sort of a
cross between a prosperous farmer without children and a poor country
gentleman with two sons at college and one in the British army, and no
money to pay their debts with."
"That last is not to my liking," said Jone.

"But the farmer part of the cross would make it all right," I said to him,
"and it strikes me that a mixture like that would just suit us while we
are staying over here. Now, if you will try to think of yourself as part
rich farmer and part poor gentleman, I'll consider myself the wife of the
combination, and I am sure we will get along better. We didn't come
over here to be looked upon as if we was the bottom of a