The Regal Rules for Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

the next evening and to a hunt ball 1 in the countryside the following weekend. She was ecstatic (as I would have been!) and went shopping for a ball gown immediately.
    When we met for cocktails the following week, I begged her to tell me every last detail. But as soon as I mentioned the ball, her face fell.
    “What happened?” I asked.
    “I was found out,” she said sadly.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “It was all going so well until the ball itself,” she said. “I mean, our dinner the other night was amazing. Then Eddie and I drove out to Berkshire together… I met his sister and some more of his friends. They all seemed to like me.”
    “But then what?”
    “I slipped.”
    “Slipped on what? Did you fall down?”
    “No! Nothing like that… It happened at the ball. During the formal dinner. We were talking about Florence and… you know how much I
love
Italy because of the art… and I guess I just wasn’t thinking because I accidentally… I accidentally… said
pasta
the wrong way.”
    I stared at her incredulously. “You mean you pronounced it like an Italian instead of an English person?” (Believe it or not, in certain UK circles, there is nothing more uncouth than pronouncing foreign words correctly. 2 )
    Hattie nodded. “They all stopped talking and just stared at me. And suddenly they
knew
I wasn’t the person they thought I was. They
knew
that I wasn’t like them. They
knew
I hadn’t grown up like them. The rest of the night was really weird between us and I haven’t heard from Eddie since.”
    It was a heartbreaking story. Through the misuse of a single word, Hattie’s working-class roots had been revealed and Edward never called her back. It didn’t matter that she made lots of money and dressed beautifully. It didn’t matter that her manners were impeccable and that she had a career most girls would kill for. Hattie’s linguistic faux pas gave the game away.
Class Counts
    People think there’s a rigid class system here, but dukes have been known to marry chorus girls! Some have even married Americans.
    —HRH P RINCE P HILIP , D UKE OF E DINBURGH
    The English are delightfully self-effacing, refined, and complex, but due to the class system that is engrained in the psyche of theirculture, if you don’t play by the rules of the game, you can feel ostracized very quickly.
    I had been in England less than a month when, through a mutual friend and an immense stroke of luck, I fell in with a dazzling English crowd. Their characters seemed to be taken straight from the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel; 3 they were the
epitom
e of the Bright Young Things; their parties even appeared in the back pages of
Tatler
! 4 And by some cosmic miracle, I (a farm girl from the backwaters of Colorado) was along for the ride.
    My new English chums all looked and sounded and acted exactly the same. Same accents (upper-class), same fashion sense (the more faded and worn your clothes appeared, the more money you had), same skin (glowingly and annoyingly clear).
    In their young minds, the past reigned superior: They liked
old
houses,
old
furniture,
old
wine,
old
money,
old
families. In fact, I noticed what seemed to be an almost fanatical preoccupation with genealogy. Unlike the American mind-set, which is primarily about what you can one day
become
, for these kids the focus seemed to be much more about what you had
been
.
    I realize the very concept of a class system is hard for most Americans to grasp—after all, it’s been drummed into our heads since birth that all people are created equal. But class pervades every single aspect of English life, so if you’re going to immerse yourself in the country, you must be aware of the antediluvian mind-set that you’re dealing with.
    While American social divides are primarily about income, the English define themselves by a nonnegotiable set of qualities that have nothing to do with raw cash and everything to do with one’s language, style, and manners.