The Borrowed Blueprint

There is a particular species of gentleman who, dealt a royal flush, lays it face down and asks the table for a fresh pair of twos. He calls it modesty. He would hate to be accused of luck. He inherits a house in Belgravia and insists on sleeping in the coal cellar, so the climb to the drawing room might feel earned. By the time he reaches the first landing he is forty-six, and the drawing room has been let to an American.

His cousin errs in the opposite direction. The cousin has a neighbour, and the neighbour has a blueprint: Palladian, symmetrical, much admired at the club. So the cousin builds it brick for brick on a plot that slopes, in a county where it rains, for a wife who detests stairs. The house is magnificent. Every door opens onto a habit belonging to somebody else. It is the oldest error in the card room: peering at another man's hand while one's own sits warm and unread.

Advantages are not a scandal to be hushed, nor a ladder to be kicked away. They are simply the floor a man happens to be standing on, and it is remarkable how few men think to build upward from the floor. The orchestra plays the same waltz for every couple on the terrace. Only the feet decide whether it is a dance or an impression of one. Comparison, in the end, is merely the costly habit of furnishing a house one will never live in.