Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare — Read

Mrs. Monnerie had rifled her collections for my use -- pygmy Venetian glass, a silver-gilt breakfast and tea service, pygmy porcelain. There were absurd little mechanical knickknacks -- piping birds, a maddening little operatic clock of which I at last managed to break the mainspring, a musical chair, and so on. My bath was of jade; my table a long one of ebony inlaid with ivory, with puffing cherub faces at each corner representing the four winds. My own few possessions, I must confess, looked not only worn but provincial by comparison. But I never surprised myself actually talking to any of Mrs. Monnerie's exquisite novelties as to my other dumb, old, wooden friends. She delighted in them far more than I.

I suppose, really to enjoy such pomp and luxury, one should be positively born in the purple; and then, I suppose, one must be careful that the dye does not go to the bone. Whether or not, I have long since come to the conclusion that I am vulgar by nature -- like my mother tongue. And at times, in spite of my relief at being free of the blackness that had craped in my last days at Beechwood, I often found myself hungering for my Bowater parlour -- even for its smell. Another thing I learned gradually at No. 2 was that I had been desperately old-fashioned; and that is, to some extent, to belong to the dead.