"It all depends, my dear fellow, on your being accepted by Henry Whitelaw as his son."
There was another silence. "Is that final, sir?"
"I'm afraid it is."
"Is there no way by which I can be taken as myself?"
Mrs. Ansley turned from her contemplation of the Lion and the Unicorn on the Old State House. "No one is ever taken as himself. We all have to be taken with the circumstances that surround us."
Ansley enlarged on this, leaning forward and toying with a paperweight. "My wife is quite right. Nobody in the world is just a human being pure and simple. He's a human being plus the conditions which go to make him up. You can't separate the conditions from the man, nor the man from the conditions. If you're Henry Whitelaw's son, stolen and brought up in circumstances no matter how poor and criminal, you're one person; if you're the son of this—this woman, whom I shan't condemn any more than I can help, you're another. You see that, don't you?"
"Can't I be—what I've made myself?"
"You can't make yourself anything but what you've been from the beginning. You can correct and improve and modify; but you can't change."
"So that if I'm the son of—of this woman, you wouldn't want me. Is that it?"
"How could we?" came from Mrs. Ansley. "But I know from Mr. Whitelaw himself that—"