13
" Llandrindon joined in the discussion. " I believe what Mardling is asking," he said, " is how one will be able to tell the difference between a shopgirl and a well-to-do woman if they are both clean and similarly dressed. And if a gentleman is not able to tell what they are by their appearance, how is he to know how to treat them?" Stunned by the snobbery of the question, Matthew considered his reply carefully. " I've always thought all women should be treated with respect no matter what their station." " Well said," Westcliff said gruffly, as Llandrindon opened his mouth to argue.No one wished to contradict the earl, but Mardling pressed, " Westcliff, do you see nothing harmful in encouraging the poor to rise above their stations? In allowing them to pretend there is no difference between them and ourselves?" " The only harm I see," Westcliff said quietly, " is in discouraging people who want to better themselves, out of fear that we will lose our perceived superiority." The statement caused Matthew to like the earl even more than he had previously. "
15
" I don’t know’,” he said. “Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer.
I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship. "
― John William Tuohy , No Time to Say Goodbye: A Memoir of a Life in Foster Care