There are certain professions, in themselves honest, useful, and even estimable, for which society has agreed to entertain a feeling of contempt.

It is, for instance, very difficult to think of a curate as anything except a butt for satirists, or to be respectful to the profession of tailoring, although many a man for private pecuniary reasons is meek before the particular individual who makes his clothes.
Yet the novelist and the playwright, who hold the mirror up to modern humanity, are occasionally kind even to curates and tailors.

There is a youthful athlete in Holy Orders who thrashes, to our immense admiration, the village bully, bewildering his victim and his admirers with his mastery of what is described a little vaguely as the 'old Oxford science.' Once, at least, a glamour of romance has been shed over the son of a tailor, and it becomes imaginable that even the chalker of unfinished coats may in the future be posed as heroic.

There is still, however, a profession which no eccentric novelist has ever ventured to represent as other than entirely contemptible.

The commercial traveller is beneath satire, and outside the region of sympathy.