And her, white-muslined, waiting there

In the porch with high-expectant heart,

While still the thin mechanic air

    Went on inside.

—Hardy, “The Musical Box”

Ernestina had, that previous night, not been able to sleep. She knew perfectly well which windows in the White Lion were Charles’s, and she did not fail to note that his light was still on long after her aunt’s snores began to creep through the silent house. She felt hurt and she felt guilty in about equal parts—that is, to begin with. But when she had stolen from her bed for quite the sixteenth time to see if the light still burned, and it did, her guilt began to increase. Charles was very evidently, and justly, displeased with her.

Now when, after Charles’s departure, Ernestina had said to herself—and subsequently to Aunt Tranter—that she really didn’t care a fig for Winsyatt, you may think that sour grapes would have been a more appropriate horticultural metaphor. She had certainly wooed herself into graciously accepting the role of chatelaine when Charles left for his uncle’s, had even begun drawing up lists of “Items to be attended to” ... but the sudden death of that dream had come as a certain relief. Women who run great houses need a touch of the general about them; and Ernestina had no military aspirations what-ever. She liked every luxury, and to be waited on, hand if not foot; but she had a very sound bourgeois sense of proportion. Thirty rooms when fifteen were sufficient was to her a folly. Perhaps she got this comparative thrift from her father, who secretly believed that “aristocrat” was a synonym of “vain ostentation,” though this did not stop him basing a not inconsiderable part of his business on that fault, or running a London house many a nobleman would have been glad of— or pouncing on the first chance of a title that offered for his dearly beloved daughter. To give him his due, he might have turned down a viscount as excessive; a baronetcy was so eminently proper.

I am not doing well by Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class’s one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it sincerely and habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certain-ly no exception here. It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her voice; she heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains ubiquitous) was that she misapplied this precious gift of self-contempt and so made herself a victim of her class’s perennial lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing its failings as a reason to reject the entire class system, she saw them as a reason to seek a higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had been hopelessly well trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder; thus reducing her own to a mere step to something sup............