Don't Come from Boston

The narrator of Alan Tate's novel The Fathers makes a passing reference to Henry Adams, then  in his early twenties, as "even then a great snob". I have questioned the qualifications of Virginians as judges of New England humility. On the other hand, Adams was aware of the impression he made:

For twenty five years, more or less, I have been trying to persuade people that I don't come from Boston and am a heartless trifler. I might as well try to prove that I am an ornithorhyncus of the siluroid civilization. If I stood on Fifth Avenue in front of the Brunswick Hotel and in a state of obvious inebriety hugged and kissed every pretty woman that passed, they would only say that I was a cold Beacon Street aristocrat, and read the New York Nation regularly.

(Letter to E.L Godkin, 6 August 1881, collected in volume II of The Letters of Henry Adams.)