“Hope? Certainly I can. Hope? There is no occasion for anything else save hope.”
“But think—think of her awful predicament.”
“I have thought of it. I am thinking of it now. Madam, you have often heard the expression that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; but has it ever occurred to you that it is quite as difficult an undertaking to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse?”
“I do not understand you. Mr. Carter.”
“Then I will explain. We are agreed, are we not, that the captain of the Shadow is no other and no less a person than Count Cadillac?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. If Count Cadillac had been reared a pirate—if he had passed all his life before he appeared here in society among us, in the slums of the world, a scoundrel, a thief, an impostor, and a felon, his advent here would have been a parallel with making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Now, we all know that while he was among us, he at least appeared the gentleman, and, therefore, we are satisfied that his antecedents were and are good.”
“That is certainly true, Nick,” said Kane. “I begin to see the point you are getting at.”
“Very well. Now, on the other hand, if he has always been a gentleman until he took up this calling of a pirate, he has undertaken the proposition of turning the saying the other way ’round; eh?”
“Changing himself into a sow’s ear, when he has, heretofore, been a sort of a silk purse; is that the idea?”