Jane's face almost brightened. "I've been rather hurt because I hadn't received a word of sympathy from—them," she said.
"They'd have come, themselves, except that politics has made a very ugly feeling against them—and Galland's your brother-in-law."
"I understand," said Jane. "But I'm not Galland—and not of that party."
"Oh, yes, you are of that party," replied Charlton. "You draw your income from it, and one belongs to whatever he draws his income from. Civilization means property—as yet. And it doesn't mean men and women—as yet. So, to know the man or the woman we look at the property."
"That's hideously unjust," cried Jane.
"Don't be utterly egotistical," said Charlton. "Don't attach so much importance to your little, mortal, WEAK personality. Try to realize that you're a mere chip in the great game of chance. You're a chip with the letter P on it—which stands for Plutocracy. And you'll be played as you're labeled."
"You make it very hard for any one to like you."
"Well—good-by, then."
And ignoring her hasty, half-laughing, half-serious protests he took himself away. She was intensely irritated. A rapid change in her outward character had been going forward since her father's death—a change in the direction of intensifying the traits that had always been really dominant, but had been less apparent because softened by other traits now rapidly whithering.
The cause of the change was her inheritance.