The Individualist Author:William Hurrell Mallock General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: Chapman and Hall Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations a... more »nd there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V. Lady Scarva, to whose impending party Lady Tregothran had alluded, was, in her own way, as active on behalf of the Liberals as Lady Tregothran and Mrs. Tilney, in their ways, were on behalf of the Tories; and she was serving the cause of progress, and was qualifying her husband for a peerage, by demonstrating how false is the idea that the extremes! democratic principles can possibly conflict with the aspirations of private life. Whilst proclaiming, as a politician, the rights and the supremacy of the many, it is impossible to imagine anybody in private life more fearless and consistent in admitting the social supremacy of the few. She thus showed how reasonable were her party's principles in reality by her own freedom from any of their apparent consequences ; and she showed at the same time the depth of her own belief in them by invariably losing her temper if anybody questioned her sincerity. She would, indeed, though devoted to her husband and her husband's fortunes, have borne with a better grace that her virtue should be doubted than her Radicalism ; whilst she was pleased, rather than otherwise, when her intimate women friends twitted her confidentially with the excesses of her social fastidiousness. ' My dears,' she would say, ' that shows how little you know about it. I am obliged to earn for my house a reputation by my small parties in order to give pleasure to those whom I only ask to my large ones.' S...« less