"I forbid you," said Godfrey French. "I won't have you hanging around there. I won't have her name coupled with yours."
"I did not know it was being coupled," Angus said, "and I do not think it is. But if it is—what then?"
"What then!" Godfrey French exclaimed. "Have you the consummate impudence to imagine that my niece would think twice of an ignorant young hawbuck without birth or education? Bah! You're a young fool!"
At the words, entirely insolent, vibrant with contempt, a hot fire of anger began to blow within Angus. With all his heart he wished that Godfrey French had been minus the thirty years he had regretted.
"Those are hard words," he said, and it was characteristic of him that as his anger rose his voice was very quiet.
"True words," Godfrey French returned.
"At any rate," Angus told him, "I make a clean living by hard work."
"And I suppose you think 'A man's a man for a' that,'" Godfrey French sneered. "Don't give me any rotten nonsense about democracy and equality."
"I am not going to," Angus replied. "I think myself that every tub should stand on its own bottom. But if, as you seem to think, there is something in a man's blood, then perhaps mine is as good as your own."
"Fine blood!" Godfrey French commented with bitter irony. "Wild, hairy Highlanders, caterans and reivers for five hundred years!"