"Why, how are you to judge?" asks the father, amused at the lad's candid prattle, "and where does the difference lie?"
"I can't tell you what it is, or how it is," the boy answered, "only one can't help seeing the difference. It isn't rank and that: only somehow there are some men gentlemen and some not, and some women ladies and some not. There's Jones now, the fifth-form master, every man sees he's a gentleman, though he wears ever so old clothes; and there's Mr. Brown, who oils his hair, and wears rings, and white chokers—my eyes! such white chokers!—and yet we call him the handsome snob! And so about Aunt Maria, she's very handsome and she's very finely dressed, only somehow she's not the ticket, you see."
"Oh, she's not the ticket?" says the Colonel, much amused.
"Well, what I mean is—but never mind," says the boy. "I can't tell you what I mean. I don't like to make fun of her, you know, for after all she's very kind to me; but Aunt Ann is different, and it seems as if what she says is more natural; and though she has funny ways of her own, too, yet somehow she looks grander,"—and here the lad laughed again. "And do you know, I often think that as good a lady as Aunt Ann herself, is old Aunt Honeyman at Brighton—that is, in all essentials, you know? And she is not a bit ashamed of letting lodgings, or being poor herself, as sometimes I think some of our family—"
"I thought we were going to speak no ill of them," says the
Colonel, smiling.
"Well, it only slipped out unawares," says Clive, laughing, "but at Newcome when they go on about the Newcomes, and that great ass, Barnes Newcome, gives himself his airs, it makes me die of laughing. That time I went down to Newcome I went to see old Aunt Sarah, and she told me everything, and do you know, I was a little hurt at first, for I thought we were swells till then? And when I came back to school, where perhaps I had been giving myself airs, and bragging about Newcome, why, you know, I thought it was right to tell the fellows."
"That's a man," said the Colonel, with delight; though had he said,
"That's a boy," he had spoken more correctly. "That's a man," cried the
Colonel; "never be ashamed of your father, Clive."
"Ashamed of my father!" says Clive, looking up to him, and walking on as proud as a peacock. "I say," the lad resumed, after a pause—
"Say what you say," said the father.
"Is that all true what's in the Peerage—in the Baronetage, about Uncle Newcome and Newcome; about the Newcome who was burned at Smithfield; about the one that was at the battle of Bosworth; and the old, old Newcome who was bar—that is, who was surgeon to Edward the Confessor, and was killed at Hastings? I am afraid it isn't; and yet I should like it to be true."