The Luminaries Wealth/Class Quotes

He did not yet know that a goldfield was a place of muck and hazard, where every fellow was foreign to the next man, and foreign to the soil; where a grocer's cradle might be thick with color, and a lawyer's cradle might run dry; where there were no divisions. Moody was some twenty years Balfour's junior, and so he spoke with deference, but he was conscious that Balfour was a man of lower standing than himself, and he was conscious also of the strange miscellany of persons around him, whose estates and origins he had not the means to guess. His politeness therefore had a slightly wooden quality, as a man who does not often speak with children lacks any measure for what is appropriate, and so holds himself apart, and is rigid, however much he wishes to be kind (I.1.43).

Thomas Balfour felt this condescension, and was delighted. He had a playful distaste for men who spoke, as he phrased it, 'much too well,' and he loved to provoke them—not to anger, which bored him, but to vulgarity, He regarded Moody's stuffiness as if it were a fashionable collar, made in some aristocratic style, that was unbearably confining to the wearer—he saw all the conventions of polite society in this way, as useless ornamentations—and it amused him, that the man's refinement caused him to be so ill at ease (I.1.44).

Had he interrupted a secret council of some kind? But what kind of council could possibly comprise such a diverse range of race, income, and estate? (I.1.199).