“You have a foolish notion that to be middle-class is to be vulgar, that to cherish the ideals of respectability and decency is to be commonplace and that to be the mother of children is to be low. You tell me that I am not middle class and that I can believe in none of these things because I am not vulgar, common-place and low, but it is just there where you make your mistake.” The speaker is Adele, a big young American girl from Baltimore; she’s arguing with two rather bohemian fellow voyagers on a ship to Europe. Adele has
thrown herself prone on the deck with the freedom of movement and the simple instinct for comfort that suggested a land of laziness and sunshine. She nestled close to the bare boards as if accustomed to make the hard earth soft by loving it. She made just a few wriggling movements to adapt her large curves to the projecting boards of the deck, gave a sigh of satisfaction and murmured “How good it is in the sun.”
“They remained there quietly in the warm sunshine looking at the bluest of blue oceans, with the wind moulding itself on their faces in great soft warm chunks.” Adele’s companions in this Winslow Homerish scene object to her calling herself middle class, but she insists:
“I never claimed to be middle class in my intellect and in truth . . . I probably have the experience
