“Suppose I did; you would not punish the child for the father’s dreadful calling, would you?”
“Most persons would.”
“Yes, they would,” said Stargarde. “We punish the children for the sins of the fathers, and we are always pointing our fingers at our neighbors and saying, ‘I am better than thou,’ as regards lineage. And yet, in the beginning we were all alike.
‘When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?’”
“That was years ago,” said Vivienne in amusement; “blood trickling through the veins of generations has become blue.”
“My dear, we go up and down. The aristocrats of to-day are the paupers of to-morrow, except in rare instances. I do not think any the more of you for a possible existence in your veins of a diluted drop of the blood royal of France. I can understand your sentiment in regard to it, if you say, ‘I must never commit a mean action because I come of a line of distinguished ancestry’; though I think a better sentiment is, ‘Here I stand as noble in the sight of God as any creature of earth; I owe it to him and to myself to keep my record clean.’”
An alarming suspicion crept into Vivienne’s mind. “Are you an anarchist?” she asked anxiously.
“Oh, no, no,” laughed Stargarde; “a socialist if you will, in the broad sense of the term, a Christian socialist; but an anarchist never.”
“Are you a loyal subject to the Queen?”