"I know my father would have been as honorable as a nobleman as he was when a shopkeeper," persisted Mary.
"That I can well believe—he was your father," said Hesper, kindly, meaning what she said, too, so far as her poor understanding of the honorable reached.
"Would you mind telling me," asked Mary, "how you would define the difference between a nobleman and a shopkeeper?"
Hesper thought a little. The question to her was a stupid one. She had never had interest enough in humanity to care a straw what any shopkeeper ever thought or felt. Such people inhabited a region so far below her as to be practically out of her sight. They were not of her kind. It had never occurred to her that life must look to them much as it looked to her; that, like Shylock, they had feelings, and would bleed if cut with a knife. But, although she was not interested, she peered about sleepily for an answer. Her thoughts, in a lazy fashion, tumbled in her, like waves without wind—which, indeed, was all the sort of thinking she knew. At last, with the decision of conscious superiority, and the judicial air afforded by the precision of utterance belonging to her class—a precision so strangely conjoined with the lack of truth and logic both—she said, in a tone that gave to the merest puerility the consequence of a judgment between contending sages:
"The difference is, that the nobleman is born to ease and dignity and affluence, and the—shopkeeper to buy and sell for his living."
"Many a nobleman," suggested Mary, "buys and sells without the necessity of making a living."
"That is the difference," said Hesper.
"Then the nobleman buys and sells to make money, and the shopkeeper to make a living?"
"Yes," granted Hesper, lazily.
"Which is the nobler end—to live, or to make money?" But this question was too far beyond Hesper. She did not even choose to hear it.