“I 'll tell you what's better still, Holy Paul,—to have Lizzy Davis for his wife. You think she's going to make a great match of it because he's the Lord Viscount and she is my daughter; but I tell you, and I 'm ready to maintain it too, I never met the man yet was worthy of her. There may be girls as handsome, though I never saw them,—there may be others as clever, that I'm no judge of; but this I do know,—that for pluck, real pluck, you 'll not find her equal in Europe. She'd never have married him for his rank; no, if it was a dukedom he had to offer her. She 'd never have taken him for his fortune, if it had been ten times the amount. No, she would n't consent to it, even to take me out of my difficulties and set me all straight with the world, because she fancied that by going on the stage, or some such trumpery, she could have done that just as well. She'd not have had him for himself, for she knows he's a fool, just as well as I do. There was only one thing I found she could n't get over: it was the thought she dare not marry him; that to thrust herself into the station and rank he occupied would be to expose herself to insults that must crush her. It was by a mere chance I discovered that this was a challenge she 'd have rather died than decline. It was for all the world like saying to myself, 'Don't you go into the ring there, Kit Davis; my Lords and the gentlemen don't like it.' 'Don't they? Well, let's see how they'll take it, for I am a-going!' It was that stung her, Paul Classon. She did n't want all those fine people; she did n't care a brass farthing about their ways and their doings! She 'd not have thought it a hard lot in life just to jog on as she is. She did n't want to be called a countess, nor live like one; but when it was hinted to her, that if she did venture amongst them, it would be to be driven back with shame and insult, then her mind was made up at once. Not that she ever confessed as much to me; no, I found out her secret by watching her closely. The day I told her I forget what anecdote about some outrageous piece of insolence played off on some new intruder into the titled class, she suddenly started as if something had stung her, and her eyes glared like a tiger's; then, catching me by the hand, she said, 'Don't tell me these things; they pain me more to hear than real, downright calamities!' That was enough for me. I saw her cards, Paul, and I played through them!”
Classon heaved a deep sigh, and was silent.
“What are you sighing over, Paul?” asked Davis, half morosely.
“I was just sorrowing to myself to think how little all her pluck will avail her.”
“Stuff and nonsense, sir! It is the very thing to depend on in the struggle.”
“Ay, if there were a struggle, Kit, but that is exactly what there will not be. You, for instance, go into Brookes's to-morrow, you have been duly elected. It was a wet day, only a few at the ballot, and somehow you got in. Well, you are, to all intents, as much a member as his Grace there, or the noble Marquis. There's no commotion, no stir when you enter the room. The men at their newspapers look up, perhaps, but they read away immediately with only increased attention; the group at the window talks on too; the only thing noticeable is that nobody talks to you. If you ask for the 'Globe' or the 'Chronicle,' when the reader shall have finished, he politely hands it at once, and goes away.”
“If he did, I'd follow him—”
“What for?—to ask an explanation where there had been no offence? To make yourself at once notorious in the worst of all possible ways? There's nothing so universally detested as the man that makes a 'row;' witness the horror all well-bred people feel at associating with Americans, they're never sure how it's to end. Now, if all these considerations have their weight with men, imagine how they mast be regarded by women, fifty times more exacting as they are in all the exigencies of station, and whose freemasonry is a hundred times more exclusive.”
“That's all rot!” broke in Davis, his passion the more violent as the arguments of the other seemed so difficult to answer. “You think to puzzle me by talking of all these grand people and their ways as if they weren't all men and women. That they are, and a rum lot, too, some of them! Come,” cried Davis, suddenly, as though a happy thought had just flashed across his mind, “it was the turn of a straw one day, by your own account, that you were not a bishop. Now, I 'd like to know, if that lucky event had really taken place, wouldn't you have been the same Holy Paul Classon that sits there?”
“Perhaps not, entirely,” said Classon, in his oiliest of voices. “I trust that I should, in ascending to that exalted station, have cast off the slough of an inferior existence, and carried up little of my former self except the friendships of my early years.”