[Gutenberg 62469] • The Sundered Streams · The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

The English language, flexible and rich though it be, lacks words in which to convey the subtler social distinctions. We have had to go abroad for 'nouveau-riche' and 'parvenu, ' to say nothing of 'Philistia, ' 'Bohemia, ' the 'demi-monde, ' and all the other geographical names that we have taken from the atlas of the human world to describe some small corner in our own little parish. But, as our civilization grows more and more complex, so does our borrowed vocabulary grow less and less adequate, until nowadays we find not a few fine differences in our microcosm which no word of our own or of any other nation avails to identify. The 'Arrived' and the 'New-rich' are familiar figures, but what of those many families who suddenly become wealthy and prominent after many generations of well-bred obscurity? They cannot fairly be described as 'nouveau-riche' or 'parvenu'; they have been there all the time, though not in evidence; to brand them with the stigma of novelty would be manifestly unfair. They have antiquity without importance-a vast difference, in the eyes of social astronomers, between them and the blazing stars of wealth that so suddenly emerge from the black[2] night of genealogical non-existence. As well compare a dazzling meteor, here and gone in a flash, with a genuine star which, after �ons of inconspicuousness, abruptly swells into a luminary of the first magnitude. To describe such fixed lights in our English hemisphere a new word must first be coined in another language, and then borrowed. Such people are not 'nouveau-riche'; they are 'renrichis.' And to this class belonged the Dadds of Darnley-on-Downe-that obscure dynasty from which it is now necessary to show the gradual genesis, through many quiet generations, of Kingston Darnley, its apostate offspring.