To Be Approved for What One Is

   As a rule Eustace flinched from being taken seriously — it meant a burden of responsibility laid on his future; but Lady Morecambe frankly regarded him as an arrived celebrity. She approved of him for what he was, not for what, after years of having his nose pressed to the grindstone, he might become. True, she was not very discriminating; she liked almost everybody, she admired almost everything, and she expressed her feelings with an absence of reserve or qualification which was a perpetual amusement to her husband. But Eustace found that attractive. Most of his friends at Oxford, and in a different way his own family (Barbara excepted), were critical and hard to please; they adopted a nil admirari attitude—his friends because they felt themselves custodians of a high aesthetic standard, Hilda and Miss Cherrington because they felt a similar obligation towards ethics.