“The demoralisation's in the air, Miss Adgate, the newspapers only tell what's happening. But our nation has the impertinence to go on, like a rooster on a wall, flapping its wings in the world's face and screeching, 'Admire me! Don't I behave pretty?' No,” continued Jack impressively, with a look of uncanny wisdom in his blue eyes, “No—I'm going to skip this country as soon as I can get out of it. Here in quiet old Oldbridge, we're not so bad, though we do like to play a game among ourselves; proud of being old and aristocratic and so forth, and we expect if we're good we'll get to Heaven; some of us, though, don't remember Charity's the only way to get to Heaven! But the whole country's talking Choctaw,—with a hare lip—and only a few of us, like your uncle and old Mrs. Leffingwell and Mr. Massington, know what a good Anglo-Saxon Ancestry implies. The rest of us cackle like the aforesaid barnyard fowl.
“Miss Adgate,” went on Jack, briskly, “no wonder! See how we mix affably with the riff-raff who haven't a language. People who are told by the blooming Constitution of this land that they're as good as you and me and make uncouth noises according. This I'm-as-good-as-you idea is all rot. They're not as good as you and they're not as good as me. I am better than the Butcher's boy, who hasn't brains enough to know his own foolish business and forgets to bring my meat. I am better than Ezekiel, who won't black my boots. Damn him,” said the boy wildly, “why shouldn't he black my boots? Let him do his honest work, like a man; become a useful member of society if he wants to get to be my equal! Not spend his days shirking and complaining through his nose.”
“Dear, dear Jackie!—Have a glass of lemonade, have a cake! America's not so bad if you can rise above it,” soothed Miss Adgate with, perhaps, a grain of malice. She rang for refreshments.
“She's the sweetest, prettiest, dearest thing in Oldbridge,” the boy thought as he followed Ruth's movements with adoring eyes.
“Miss Adgate, am I accountable for what my double great-grandfather did?” Jack asked suddenly. “I think he played me a low trick. He was one of these Cavalier people who stuck to Charles the Second. The King, after he'd come to the throne, offered him the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. But the idiot refused it! He'd tasted blood, he said. He knew Court life, found it dull!—He wanted one of adventure, something like the dance he'd been leading with Charles. 'Give me land, Sire, in Virginia,' he said. 'I'll go out there and extend your Majesty's importance.'
“Miss Adgate, he should have stuck to Merry England. And pray, what did his great-grandson do? Married a Northerner, became wife-ridden, dropped his title, sold his lands, went to New England, settled right here in Oldbridge, his wife's town; and equipped a regiment and fought. I'm glad to say he got killed, at Lexington. But not without leaving posterity, of which you see before you the last indignant remnant.”
“And you, you find you're reverted to the state of mind of the Cavalier before he forsook England,” Ruth said thoughtfully. “Jack, you've a homesick hankering to go back there?”
“Yes, Miss Adgate,” cried the boy. “And, I'll tell you a still greater secret——”
Jack paused.
“C'est une journée de confidences,” thought Ruth, “well?” she encouraged.