She seemed to feel that her
indifference needed a reason to excuse itself in her own eyes,
and she showed the subconscious sympathy of the Irish nature
which never feels itself perfectly at home even in England. She,
too, was some shadowy shade un-English.
Always conscious of this barrier, while the war lasted the
private secretary hid himself among the herd of foreigners till
he found his relations fixed and unchangeable. He never felt
himself in society, and he never knew definitely what was meant
as society by those who were in it. He saw far enough to note a
score of societies which seemed quite independent of each other.
The smartest was the smallest, and to him almost wholly strange.
The largest was the sporting world, also unknown to him except
through the talk of his acquaintances. Between or beyond these
lay groups of nebulous societies. His lawyer friends, like
Evarts, frequented legal circles where one still sat over the
wine and told anecdotes of the bench and bar; but he himself
never set eyes on a judge except when his father took him to call
on old Lord Lyndhurst, where they found old Lord Campbell, both
abusing old Lord Brougham. The Church and the Bishops formed
several societies which no secretary ever saw except as an
interloper. The Army; the Navy; the Indian Service; the medical
and surgical professions; City people; artists; county families;
the Scotch, and indefinite other subdivisions of society existed,
which were as strange to each other as they were to Adams.
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