“ I haven’t any class prejudice.”
“You are wrong; believe me you have immensely these prejudices. I could quite easily prove this to you. You are in many ways most exceptionally for an Englishwoman emancipated. But you are still pure-Tory.”
“That is only my stamp. I can’t help that. But I myself have no prejudices.”
“They are so far in you unconscious.” He spoke with extreme gentleness, and Miriam looked uneasily ahead, wondering whether with this strange knowledge at her side she might be passing forward to some fresh sense of things that would change the English world for her. English prejudices. He saw them as clearly as he saw that she was not beautiful. And gently, as if they were charming as well as funny to him. Their removal would come; through a painless association. For a while she would remain as she was. But even seeing England from his point of view, was being changed; a little. The past, up to the last few moments, was a life she had lived without knowing that it was a life lived in special circumstances and from certain points of view. Now, perhaps moving away from it, these circumstances and points of view suddenly became a possession, full of fascinating interest. But she had lived blissfully. Something here and there in his talk threatened happiness.
He seemed to see people only as members of nations, grouped together with all their circumstances. Perhaps everything could be explained in this way. … All her meaning for him was her English heredity, a thing he seemed to think the finest luck in the world, and her free English environment, the result of it; things she had known nothing