"There you are already beginning! Why not Polish?"
"Because a Polish gentleman has not sufficient faith in his own blood; he plainly has not sufficient pride to believe that he will elevate a woman to himself and not lower himself to her."
Gronski began to laugh:
"I did not expect that charge from your lips," he said.
"Why? I am an individualist, and in so far as I do not regard myself as a specimen of the basest race, so far do I regard myself as a specimen of the best. According to me one belongs to the aristocracy only through lucky chance; that is, when one brings into the world a suitable profile and corresponding brain. But Dolhanski, for instance, in so far as he has not purchased portraits of ancestors at an auction--and our other gentlemen--judge that blood constitutes that appurtenance. Now granting these premises, I contend that our tories do not know how to be proud of their blood."
"At home," said Gronski, "you vent your spleen upon the socialists, and here you wish to vent it upon the aristocracy."
"That does not diminish my merits. I have a few pretty remarks for the National Democracy."
"I know, I know. But how will you prove that which you said about the Polish tories?"
"How will I prove it? By the Socratic method--with the aid of questions. Did you ever observe when a Polish gentleman abroad becomes acquainted with a Frenchman or Englishman? I, while I had money, passed winters in Nice or in Cairo and saw a number of them. Now, every time I propounded to myself the question which now I put to you: why the devil it is not the Frenchman or Englishman who tries to please the Pole, but the Pole them? Why is it that only the Pole fawns, only the Pole coquets? Because he is almost ashamed of his descent; and if by chance a Frenchman tells him that from his accent he took him for a Frenchman, or an Englishman takes him for an Englishman, then he melts with joy, like butter in a frying-pan! Ah, I have seen such coquettes by the score--and it is an old story. Such coquetry, for instance, Stanislaus Augustus[[11]] possessed. At home, the Polish gentleman at times knows how to hold his nose high. Before a foreigner he is on both paws. Is not that a lack of pride in his own race, in his own blood, in his own traditions? If you have the slightest grain of a sense of justice, even though no larger than the grain of caviar, you must admit the justice of my remarks. As to myself, I have been ashamed sometimes that I am a Pole."
"That means that you committed the same sin with which you charge others," replied Gronski. "If the tips of the wings of our eagle reached both seas, as at one time they did, perhaps Poles might be different. But at present--tell me--of what are they to be proud?"