Next season, when I read of Lady Carabas's splendid entertainments in
the MORNING POST, and see the poor old insolvent cantering through the
Park--I shall have a much tenderer interest in these great people than
I have had heretofore. Poor old shabby Snob! Ride on and fancy the world
is still on its knees before the house of Carabas! Give yourself airs,
poor old bankrupt Magnifico, who are under money-obligations to your
flunkeys; and must stoop so as to swindle poor tradesmen! And for us, O
my brother Snobs, oughtn't we to feel happy if our walk through life is
more even, and that we are out of the reach of that surprising arrogance
and that astounding meanness to which this wretched old victim is
obliged to mount and descend.
CHAPTER XXIX--A VISIT TO SOME COUNTRY SNOBS
Notable as my reception had been (under that unfortunate mistake of Mrs.
Ponto that I was related to Lord Snobbington, which I was not permitted
to correct), it was nothing compared to the bowing and kotooing, the
raptures and flurry which preceded and welcomed the visit of a real live
lord and lord's son, a brother officer of Cornet Wellesley Ponto, in
the 120th Hussars, who came over with the young Cornet from Guttlebury,
where their distinguished regiment was quartered. This was my
Lord Gules, Lord Saltire's grandson and heir: a very young, short,
sandy-haired and tobacco-smoking nobleman, who cannot have left the
nursery very long, and who, though he accepted the honest Major's
invitation to the Evergreens in a letter written in a school-boy
handwriting, with a number of faults of spelling, may yet be a very fine
classical scholar for what I know: having had his education at Eton,
where he and young Ponto were inseparable.
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