Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in the
world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and
discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days
took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist
of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself
called to that station in life which his parents already occupied, and
nothing, except the chance of a brilliant career or of a 'good' marriage,
could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior caste. M.
Swann, the father, had been a stockbroker; and so 'young Swann' found
himself immured for life in a caste where one's fortune, as in a list of
taxpayers, varied between such and such limits of income. We knew the
people with whom his father had associated, and so we knew his own
associates, the people with whom he was 'in a position to mix.' If he knew
other people besides, those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old
friends of the family, like my relatives, shut their eyes all the more
good-naturedly that Swann himself, after he was left an orphan, still came
most faithfully to see us; but we would have been ready to wager that the
people outside our acquaintance whom Swann knew were of the sort to whom
he would not have dared to raise his hat, had he met them while he was
walking with ourselves.
Pages:
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36