angel out of my own country. You see the wretchedness of my position, I am uncomfortable wherever I am. In my present situation I imagine slights. Anecdotes told at table make me wince, jokes fret me. Conversation on certain subjects halts because I am present. Yet I cannot revert to my native condition; that would be deterioration, now I have acquired polish, and have progressed."
"I should not have supposed, Mr. Saltren, that you were so full of trouble."
"No, looking on a rose-pip, all smoothness, you do not reckon on its being full of choke within. And now—Miss Inglett, you see at once an instance of my lack of tact and knowledge. I am in doubt whether I have done well to pour out my pottle of troubles in your ear, or whether I behaved like a booby."
"I invited you to it."
"Precisely, but in the language of the Isle of Guava, words do not mean what they are supposed to mean in the Land of Bacon. I may have transgressed those invisible bounds which you recognise by an instinct of which I am deficient. There are societies which have laws and signs of fellowship known only to the initiated. You belong to one, the great Freemasonry of Aristocratic Culture. You all know one another in it, how—is inconceivable to me, though I watch and puzzle to find the symbol; and your laws, unwritten, I can only guess at, but you all know them, suck them in with mother's milk. I have been, brought up among you, but I have only an idea of your laws, and as for your shibboleth—it escapes me altogether. And now—I do not know whether I have acted rightly or wrongly in telling you how I am situated. I am in terror lest in taking you at your word I may not have grossly offended you, and lest you be now saying in your heart, What an unlicked cub this is! how ignorant of tact, how lacking in good breeding! He should have passed off my invitation
