'Vernie dear, a man who goes about the country in a cart selling things can't be a gentleman!' said his mother.
'I don't quite see that, Lady Palliser,' exclaimed Bessie, who was inspecting the book-shelves. 'A gentleman may fall upon evil days, and have to earn his living somehow, don't you know; and why shouldn't he have a cart, and go about selling things? There's nothing disreputable in it, though he could hardly go into society, perhaps, while he was driving the cart, because the mass of mankind are such fools. Why shouldn't Vernie's instinct be right, and this Cheap Jack be a reduced gentleman? Froude says that in the colonies Oxford men may be seen mending the roads. Why shouldn't one man in the world have the courage to do humble work in his own country? This Jack is a University man.'
'How do you know that?' asked Lady Palliser, eagerly. She was ready to bow down before a University man as a necessarily superior being. There had never been such a person of her own blood.
'Here is a volume of Æschylus—the Clarendon Press—with his college arms. He is a Balliol man, the same college as my cousin Brian's.'
'That proves nothing,' said Lady Palliser, contemptuously. 'He may have bought the book at a stall. All his furniture is second-hand, why not his books?'
'Oh, but here are more books with the Balliol arms—Pindar, Theocritus,
Catullus, Horace, Virgil.'
'Can't you find his name in any of them?'
'No; that has been erased in some of the books, and has never been written in the others. Poor fellow! I daresay he would not like his real name to be known.'
'Didn't I tell you he was a gentleman, mother?' exclaimed Vernon, triumphantly.
Lady Palliser was almost convinced. The neat, substantially furnished room—so free from frippery or foppishness—the queer Oriental pipes—the well-used books in sober calf bindings, which had once been splendid—the college arms on almost every volume—these details impressed her in spite of herself.