It was not unnatural, with the example of her mother before her eyes, that Elizabeth should have a healthy loathing of Art. In fact, any excess of intellect—‘braininess’ was her word for it—tended to belong, in her eyes, to the ‘beastly’. Real people, she felt, decent people—people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes—were not brainy. They didn’t go in for this nonsense of writing books and fooling with paint brushes; and all these highbrow ideas—Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary.
