Plover's Eggs

Perhaps you may have noticed scattered through some of Ronald Dworkin's egalitarian literature (in Freedom's Law, as well as in the first 'What is Equality'? piece) the reference to "plover's eggs."  Dworkin uses plover's eggs to indicate a hyper-cultivated sensibility or taste which counts for nothing in his equality-of-resources framework.

Why plover's eggs as an association with grand, even excessive, cultivation -- itself such an arcane and cultivated allusion?  It is no doubt a mark of my lack of true moral seriousness that I was always just as interested in the reference as the argument.  I chased down a lead to Kenneth Arrow, but that didn't really help much.  It did not explain the source of the allusion. 

I recently found a possible, and I think likely, answer.  The reference is to Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited."  When Charles Ryder visits Sebastian Marchmain in his room at Oxford, Sebastian is peeling a plover's egg.  If this is the source of the reference, perhaps it gives the discussion of plover's eggs in these egalitarian treatments a special Catholic hue?  Here is a passage from Waugh that I have enjoyed.

The family history was typical of the Catholic squires of England; from Elizabeth's reign till Victoria's they lived sequestered lives among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad; often marrying there -- inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferment; and learning, in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house.

Mr. Samgrass's deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing -- poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two -- which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air; and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.  These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the traveling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures.  I wondered as the train carried me farther and farther from Lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war.  Did she see a sign in the red centre of her cozy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the window-pane, this whisper of doom?