There's hardly another millionaire alive who has the
moral courage to have a gilt monogram on a chair like that one in
the gun-room. For that matter, there's the name as well as the
monogram. Names like Tompkins and Jenkins and Jinks are funny
without being vulgar; I mean they are vulgar without being common.
If you prefer it, they are commonplace without being common. They
are just the names to be chosen to _look_ ordinary, but they're
really rather extraordinary. Do you know many people called
Tompkins? It's a good deal rarer than Talbot. It's pretty much the
same with the comic clothes of the parvenu. Jenkins dresses like a
character in Punch. But that's because he is a character in Punch. I
mean he's a fictitious character. He's a fabulous animal. He doesn't
exist.
"Have you ever considered what it must be like to be a man who
doesn't exist? I mean to be a man with a fictitious character that
he has to keep up at the expense not merely of personal talents: To
be a new kind of hypocrite hiding a talent in a new kind of napkin.
This man has chosen his hypocrisy very ingeniously; it was really a
new one. A subtle villain has dressed up as a dashing gentleman and
a worthy business man and a philanthropist and a saint; but the loud
checks of a comical little cad were really rather a new disguise.
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