All men are snobs about something. One is almost tempted to add: There is nothing about which men cannot feel snobbish. But this would doubtless be an exaggeration. There are certain disfiguring and mortal diseases about which there has probably never been any snobbery. I cannot imagine for example, that there are any leprosy-snobs. More picturesque diseases, even when they are dangerous, and less dangerous diseases, particularly when they are the diseases of the rich, can be and very frequently are a source of snobbish self-importance. I have met several adolescent consumption-snobs, who thought that it would be romantic to fade away in the flower of youth, like Keats or Marie Bashkirtseff. Alas, the final stages of the consumptive fading are generally a good deal less romantic than these ingenuous young tubercle-snobs seem to imagine. To anyone who has actually witnessed these final stages, the complacent poeticizing of those adolescents must seem as exasperating as they are profoundly pathetic. In the case of those commoner disease-snobs, whose claim to distinction is that they suffer from one of the maladies of the rich, exasperation is not tempered by very much sympathy. People who possess sufficient leisure, sufficient wealth, not to mention sufficient health, to go travelling from spa to spa, from doctor to fashionable doctor, in search of cures from problematical diseases (which, in so far as they exist at all, probably have their source in overeating) cannot expect us to be very lavish in our solicitude and pity. - Aldous Huxley
What is generally a good deal less romantic than what the ingenuous young tubercle snobs seem to imagine?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Final stages of consumptive fading
The writer says that "the final stages of the consumptive fading are generally a good deal less romantic" than the young tubercle-snobs imagine. Consumption is an old name for tuberculosis, a disease that slowly wastes the body; its last stages are painful, not romantic.
Why the Other Options are Incorrect?
Option 1: Complacent poeticizings — Incorrect. Wrong link: Complacent means smugly satisfied with oneself, and poeticizing is talking about something as if it were poetry. This is how the writer describes the adolescents' talk, which he finds exasperating; it is not what he calls less romantic.
Example: After two wins the team became complacent and lost the third match.
Option 2: Certain disfiguring — Incorrect. Wrong link: Disfiguring means spoiling the appearance of the body. The writer mentions disfiguring and deadly diseases as ones about which there is no snobbery at all, not as something less romantic than imagined.
Example: The burns left a disfiguring scar on his arm.
Option 3: Intellectual activities that are depressing — Incorrect. Not mentioned: the passage says nothing about intellectual activities.