Why, he had only shown the plainest kind of American good sense.

As for snobbishness, was not the silly-child American brand of it less ridiculous than this unblushing and unconcealed self-reverence, without any physical, mental or material justification whatsoever?
They hadn't good manners even, because--as Dory had once said--no one could have really good manners who believed, and acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of his own family--the human race.
"I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had banished spontaneous gayety.

"I suppose I could even again come to fancying this the only life.

But I certainly don't care for it now." But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind--her own eyes and her own mind--in observing what was going on around her, she did not disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts.

Common sense--absolute common sense--always sounds incongruous in a conventional atmosphere.