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His taste would have seemed extreme to a man of the nineteenth century.
But slowly and inevitably in the intervening years a gulf had opened
between the wearers of the blue canvas and the classes above, a
difference not simply of circumstances and habits of life, but of habits
of thought--even of language. The underways had developed a dialect of
their own: above, too, had arisen a dialect, a code of thought, a
language of "culture," which aimed by a sedulous search after fresh
distinction to widen perpetually the space between itself and
"vulgarity." The bond of a common faith, moreover, no longer held the
race together. The last years of the nineteenth century were
distinguished by the rapid development among the prosperous idle of
esoteric perversions of the popular religion: glosses and
interpretations that reduced the broad teachings of the carpenter of
Nazareth to the exquisite narrowness of their lives. And, spite of their
inclination towards the ancient fashion of living, neither Elizabeth nor
Denton had been sufficiently original to escape the suggestion of their
surroundings. In matters of common behaviour they had followed the ways
of their class, and so when they fell at last to be Labour Serfs it
seemed to them almost as though they were falling among offensive
inferior animals; they felt as a nineteenth-century duke and duchess
might have felt who were forced to take rooms in the Jago.
Their natural impulse was to maintain a "distance." But Denton's first
idea of a dignified isolation from his new surroundings was soon rudely
dispelled. He had imagined that his fall to the position of a Labour
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