"How is everything?" he asked at once, taking on that smile which seemed to put him outside the sphere of my interests.
I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at the spoon with which I was dabbling in my cup. "Oh, just the same," I glanced up to say. "Tell me. Have people in this country no other measure of your standing but that of money?"
"Have they any such measure in any country?"
I was beginning with the words, "Why, yes," when he interrupted me.
"Think."
"I am thinking," I insisted. "In England and Canada and the British Empire generally—"
"You attach some importance to birth. Yes; so do we here—when it goes with money. Without the basis of that support neither you nor we give what is so deliciously called birth the honor of a second thought."
"Oh yes, we do—"
"When it's your only asset—yes; but you do it alone. No one else pays it any attention."
I colored. "That's rather cruel—"