“Anyhow, I never heard a lady express herself as a true woman about any kind of misfortune. As a footman I used to serve cups of tea at entertainments organised for charitable purposes, and heard there some rum remarks. One lady said in reply to another who was relating to her some pitiful story of misery, ‘Well, you see, dear Lady So-and-So, these people are more or less accustomed to privations.’ And I heard another lady say that misery was relative: a millionaire reduced to a paltry income of £3000 a year suffered more actual privations than a poor man who could not afford meat once a week. I thought of old Bill Tooley’s widow who was found dead from starvation last winter. There was no question of relative misery in her case, for one can’t do more than die. Can one, my lord?”
“We have lived long enough under the delusion of our superiority over you. We must once for all face the truth and have the courage to say that it was only owing to the unfairness in the game of life that we won the trumpery race. We were given points at our birth, and later, as we entered Sandhurst or the Universities, points were granted us to enable us to advance quicker towards the winning-post. But these advantages which gave us our social distinctions, were as many rungs cut off from the ladder, rendering the ascent laborious to others, and the top unreachable. Life is the arena in which all men have to run the race—in their skins.”
“This is beyond me, my lord,” humbly said the valet. “Only educated people, such as you, can discuss these topics. I ’ave spoken what I felt; if I have made you understand a little more about what we were, so much the better; but I am an ignorant man, and you must excuse my speech.”
“My good man, ignorance is easily remedied; besides, we have a great deal to learn, perhaps more than you have, for we set ourselves up as your teachers, although we knew little either of you or of ourselves. But how is it that you should think that education causes a man’s superiority, when you used to believe that wealth constituted supremacy?”
“Well, my lord, it was the only difference we could see between the upper classes and the lower ones. But I seem now to judge things from another point of view; it must be owing to our having no livery, and to your lordship’s appearing to me as God made you. We do not envy beauty, for we know that it is not made in factories at the expense of children’s health and youth.”