“I'm not shivering—I'm chattering,” she mocked. “Why should I go in when we are going to be really serious?”
Paul waited a moment; his breath came short, as if he were facing a postponed dread. “Moya, dear,” he began in a forced tone, “I can't help my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can help your light heart—God bless it—and your theory of class which to me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when he is in love. But now I want you to know me.”
He took her hand and kissed it repeatedly, as if impressing upon her the one important fact back of all hypothesis and perilous efforts at statement.
“Well, are you bidding me good-by?”
“You must give me time,” he said. “It takes courage in these days for a good American to tell the girl he loves that his father was a hired man.”
He smiled, but there was little mirth and less color in his face.
“What absurdity!” cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly, “My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!”
“My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that. At eleven he worked for his board and clothes at my Grandfather Van Elten's, and from that time he earned his bread with his hands. Don't imagine that I'm apologizing,” Paul went on rapidly. “The apology belongs on the other side. In New York, for instance, the Bogardus blood is quite as good as the Bevier or the Broderick or the Van Elten; but up the Hudson, owing to those chances or mischances that selected our farming aristocracy for us, my father's people had slipped out of their holdings and sunk to the poor artisan class which the old Dutch landowners held in contempt.”
“We are not landowners,” said Moya. “What does it matter? What does any of it matter?”
“It matters to be honest and not sail under false colors. I thought you would not speak of the Poor Man as you do if you knew that I am his son.”