The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.

When a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur's kingdom.
Here I was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and only actually great man in that whole British world; and yet there and then, just as in the remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could claim long descent from a king's leman, acquired at second-hand from the slums of London, was a better man than I was.

Such a personage was fawned upon in Arthur's realm and reverently looked up to by everybody, even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base as his lineage.

There were times when _he_ could sit down in the king's presence, but I couldn't.

I could have got a title easily enough, and that would have raised me a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the king's, the giver of it.