Black Maria with Lord Snooker

Snake and sword. A novel. By Percival Christopher Wren. 1914. P. 88-89

The prize product of the Smellie system was the Haddock whose whole life was a pose ,a lie, a refusal to see the actual. Perhaps she influenced him more strongly than the others because he was caught younger and was of weaker fibre. Anyhow he grew up the perfect and heartless snob, and by the time he left Oxford, he would sooner have been seen in a Black Maria with Lord Snooker than in a heavenly chariot with a prophet of unmodish garment and vulgar ancestry.

To the finished Haddock, a tie was more than a character , and the cut of a coat more than the cut ting of a loving heart.

To him a “gentleman” was a person who had the current accent and waistcoat, a competence, the entrée here and there — a goer unto the correct places with the correct people. Manners infinitely more than conduct; externals everything; let the whitening be white and the sepulchre mattered not.