'I have just been writing to your Uncle Tom, telling him I want to spend a great deal of money,' she began, rather to divert the conversation than from any pressing desire for his opinion, 'and I don't feel at all sure about what he will say. Your aunt does not approve, I know.'
'May I ask how you are going to spend it?' he inquired, with interest.
'Oh yes. I want to institute a Club for working girls in Glasgow, and a holiday house for them here.'
'But there are any amount of such things in Glasgow already, and I question if they do any good. I know my mother and Ju are always down on them, and there's truth in what they say, too, that we are making a god out of the working class. It is quite sickening what is done for them, and how ungrateful they are.'
Gladys winced a little, and he perceived that he had spoken rather strongly.
'I know there is a good deal done, but I think sometimes the methods are not quite wise,' she said quietly. 'I am going to run my Club, as the Americans say, on my own lines. You see, I am rather different, for I have been a poor working girl myself, and I know both what they need and what will do them most good.'
'You seem rather proud of the distinction,' he said involuntarily. 'Most women in your position would have made a point of ignoring the past. That is what half of Glasgow is trying to do all the time—forget where they sprang from. Why are you so different?'
'I do not know.' Her lips curled in a fine scorn. 'As if it mattered,' she said half-contemptuously,—'as if it mattered what anybody had sprung from. I was reading Burns this morning, and I felt as if I could worship him if for nothing more than writing these lines—
"The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that."'
'That's all very good in theory,' he said a trifle lazily; 'and besides, it is very easy for you to speak like that, with centuries of lineage behind you. I suppose the Grahams are as old as the Eglintons, or the Alexanders, or even the great Portland family itself, if you come to inquire into it. Yes, it is very easy for you to despise rank.'