Mary McCarthy, “Ghostly Father, I Confess”:

Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.

If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she administered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a “parvenu,” an “upstart,” an “adventurer,” a politician was always “cheap,” and an opportunist “vulgar.” But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow himself the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned.