"I don't know why they are not. They are incessantly being compared, to their own disadvantage, with the aristocracies of foreign lands. But I have traveled considerably, in my time, and on the whole I prefer them to all similar bodies. There is less sham about them, and quite as much reason for existence. They point a very sad moral, perhaps; they illustrate what certain austere critics like to call the failure of republican ideas. But I've had so many good friends among them that I can't consider any institution a failure which is responsible for their development."
"And it is very hard to become one of their number," Claire said, after another little pause. She did not put the words as a question.
"You seem to think it hard," Thurston answered. Rare as was any impulsive order of speech with him, this slight yet meaning sentence had nevertheless found utterance, almost against his will.
It was his first reference to the episode which both vividly remembered, though in far different ways, and which had cast round their subsequent intercourse, even when directed upon the most mundane topics, a delicate glamour of sentiment plainly perceptible to each. Claire dropped her eyes, for a moment, then suddenly lifted them, while the pink was yet deepening in her cheeks.
"Let us suppose that I am not speaking of myself," she said. "Indeed," she went on, with a soft, peculiar smile that had hardly lighted her lips before it fled, "you have told me that my gate into the kingdom of the elect is through—well, through matrimony." She now looked at her companion with so subtle a blending of the arch and the grave that Thurston, in all the solidity of his veteran experience, was baffled how to explain it. "Suppose," she suddenly announced to him, "that I should marry Mr. Brady. He is your abhorrence, I know. But if he put his millions at my disposal, could I become the great lady you and I have talked about?"
Thurston was stroking his mustache, and he now seemed to speak under it, a trifle gruffly, as he answered her.
"Yes," he said, "I think you could—provided Brady quitted the world after marrying you."
Claire gave a little rippling laugh. "They would never allow him to be one of them?" she asked, in tones whose precise import her hearer still failed to define, and which impressed him as midway between raillery and seriousness.
"No, never. If he has proposed to you, my poor child, don't for an instant flatter yourself that you could use him as a ladder by which to climb up into your coveted distinction."
These words were spoken with a commiserating ridicule. Tried a man of the world as he was, Thurston had of late been so deeply wounded that he now felt his wound bleed afresh, at an instant's notice, and deal him a severe pang as well. But Claire, quite forgetting to make allowances, flushed hotly, and at once said:—