Our utter ignorance of the brilliant social life which

Swann led was, of course, due in part to his own reserve

and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class
people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view
of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined
castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to
that station in life which his parents already occupied, and
from which nothing, save the accident of an exceptional
career or of a
good
marriage, could extract you and
translate you to a superior caste. M. Swann the elder had
been a stockbroker; and so young Swann found himself
immured for life in a caste whose members fortunes, as in
a category of tax-payers, varied between such and such
limits of income. One knew the people with whom his
father had associated, and so one knew his own associates,
the people with whom he was in a position to mix. If he
knew other people besides, those were youthful
acquaintances on whom the old friends of his family, like
my relatives, shut their eyes all the more good-naturedly
because Swann himself, after he was left an orphan, still
came most faithfully to see us; but we would have been
ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance
whom Swann knew were of the sort to whom he would not
have dared to raise his hat if he had met them while he was