SIR.—Il seems to me that the title Class in the
Kitchen for Mrs. Seaton's article is based on fallacious thinking. Mrs. Scaton's conscious superiority implied in every sentence of her article is, I think, due to lack of imagination and intolerance ; she does not realise that there can be a ditlercnce in taste for this or that way of spending money due to fashion, education or even temperament. The sailor-suits which she disdains represented the taste of royalty a couple of generations ago, and I have seen the children's dungarees of which she approves worn by the children of intellectuals inhabiting Hampstead flats and by the children of unedu- cated immigrants in tumble-down shacks on the Canadian prairie ; this does not put the wearers in the same class. My husband has treated my favourite bureau with a lack of consideration only equalled by my barbaric treatment of his car engine or the char's treatment of her mattress. But our respective attitudes to car and furniture arc surely not class attitudes. Different things appeal to us differently, and who shall say that one or other of our standards of importance is inferior or superior, wise or unwise.
In some ways I am as economical as Mrs. Seaton and have the same— if we are talking of class, shall we say "bourgeois "—standards, but I have been known to ruin a new pair of silk stockings in a ten-minute walk in the woods here. I thought it was absent-mindedness. Surely it could not be my class ?
I think it is a pity these things should be said and written with their hurtful implications. When the char offered to pay for the second-hand clothes, why should not Mrs. Seaton imply "parity of esteem" by accept- ing the shyly offered payment ? Was it not rather arrogant to suggest that different standards of conduct were expected ? Moreover, the Implication was one-sided.
I sometimes think that it is the speech and actions of people like the writer of this article that are partly responsible for the bitterness that is so often heard In the voices of speakers of the extreme Left. They, too,
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