Oh, why had they not been born like the other Sidonians, whose natures and ideals had been mercifully calculated to the meridian of Sidon! Why didn't they think the Proudfoots and the Wilkinsons and the Wagstaffs, and other local nobody-somebodies, people of importance, and why did they think the mayor a ludicrous upstart, and the adjacent J.P.a sententious old idiot?
Far better to have rested content in that state of life to which God had called them.

To talk French, or to play Chopin! What did it matter?
In one sense nothing, but in another it mattered like other convenient facilities of life.

To the immortal soul it mattered nothing, but to the mortal social unit it made life the easier, made the passage of ideas, the intercourse of individualities, the readier, and, in general, facilitated spiritual and intellectual, as well as social, communication.

To be first-rate in your instincts, in all your fibres, and third-rate in your opportunities,--that was a bitter indignity of circumstance.
This sub-conscious sense of aristocracy--it must be observed, lest it should have been insufficiently implied--was almost humorously dissociated in the minds of the young Mesuriers from any recorded family distinctions.

In so far as it was conscious, it was defiantly independent of genealogy.