Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/23

with restlessness, are decorated with cheap textiles of old-gold shades and ancestral discolorations; books are laid over literary ink-spots on the table-scarf (not table-cloth); chairs, purposely placed carelessly, are always in the way. Men wear oppressive sleeve-buttons; women divide their hair on the shadow of a diagonal and adopt æstheticism in dress, because it hides economy under the pretence of a cultured soul.

Their speech is strewn with niceties of grammar and pronunciations which are painfully correct; acute accents are placed on syllables, and en is added to the participle got. They never use a slang term which would avoid the use of circumlocution; they choose their substantives and adjectives from Latin, rather than Saxon roots. They talk of psychological conditions, and use physiological terms with surprising familiarity. There is no humbug so easily penetrated as that of the striving to be above the level of humanity.