He sat down again quickly, feeling hot and cold with shame, just as he remembered he had been wont to feel when he had committed some gaucherie in his early days in England.

"Your eminence," she said, "you must pardon Bobby's gaucherie.

" Resuming her company voice, and with the aplomb of a perfect hostess who has rectified the gaucherie of an awkward guest, she pressed upon me another cup of the custard coffee, and tactfully inquired of the supposedly embarrassed Mrs. Judge Robinson if she did not think this was very warm weather for this time of year.

In them is held up to ridicule the gaucherie, the contracted notions, the vulgarity, the conceit, and the general snobbism of the middle-class English abroad.