Philip listened and was moved, not only by sympathy, which—again in strict accordance with his blood and breeding—he was careful not to express, but also by a vast wonder. No young woman of his limited acquaintance in the homeland could ever have been induced to talk so frankly and freely to a comparative stranger. Yet there was also a proud reserve just behind the frankness, and after a time he came to understand that it was pride of birth. The Dabneys, as he gathered, were an ancient family, descended from the Huguenot D’Aubignys, and originally Virginians. As a Trask and a son of more or less hardy New England stock, family traditions meant little to him. But he was beginning to see that they meant very much indeed to the soft-speaking young woman beside him.
“It is evident that you believe in blue blood,” he ventured to say, after the Dabney lineage had been fairly traced for him. Then he added: “We don’t think so very much of that in New England.”
“Oh, I don’t see how you can help it,” was the astonished exclamation. “Don’t you believe in heredity?”
“Yes, I suppose I do, in a way,” he qualified. “We can’t expect to gather figs from thistles. Still, it is a long step from that admission to a belief in—well, in anything like an aristocracy of the blood.”
“You think there is no such thing as gentle blood?”
“Not in the sense that one person is intrinsically better than another. Unless all history is at fault, the ‘gentle blood’ you speak of is just as likely to go hideously wrong as any other.”
“I don’t agree with you at all,” was the prompt retort.
“I didn’t expect you would—after what you have been telling me. But we needn’t quarrel about it,” he went on good-naturedly. “I suppose you would call your family patrician and mine plebeian—which it doubtless is; at any rate, it is farmer stock on both sides as far back as I know anything about it, people who worked with their hands, and——”
“It was no disgrace for them to work with their hands; that isn’t at all what I meant. It is something much bigger than that.”
“Well, what is it, then? A clean family record?”