“You’re so serious! Suppose he had been a rag-picker? What of it? The man who picks rags today deals in them tomorrow and gets rich. His children go to school and his son sells the land the junk-shop was on and starts a dry-goods store on the next corner. And in a few years he’s rich, too, and becomes a bank director. And his son grows up and marries the daughter of the wealthiest man in town. And if you met his son on the campus tomorrow you’d think ‘There’s a chap with breeding!’”
“It takes more than three generations,” answered Leon stiffly.
“You mean it used to,” Monty had laughed. “Nowadays things move faster. Why not? We put up a two-million-dollar building in six months. We ought to be able to make a gentleman in two generations. I don’t know much about my family, but I remember my father telling of the time when he walked four miles to school in his bare feet, and so I guess there weren’t any lords or dukes on my family tree!”
“Poverty has nothing to do with it. Your father’s father——”
“It has a lot to do with it nowadays,” chuckled Monty. “Do you suppose I’d have had the courage to come east here and butt in on these high-brows with their silver-backed brushes and all if I hadn’t had a gob of money behind me? Yes, I would—not! Son, it’s having something in the old sock that gives you the right to shove through the crowd and take a front seat. If my father had been George Washington and my mother—er—Mary Antoinette, or whatever her name was, and I didn’t have any money, I’d just as soon thought of jumping off the Washington Monument as coming here to school!”
“That’s nonsense! Money has nothing to do with it!”
“Wait a bit! Your folks have money. You haven’t told me so, but your father’s a sugar dealer—factor, you call it, don’t you?—and you dress like a circus horse, and so I guess it’s a fair bet that they have. All right. But just suppose they hadn’t. Suppose you had just enough money to pay your fare up here and back and your tuition. A lot of good your old ancestors would do you!”
“I’d be just the same as I am now, wouldn’t I?”
“No, you wouldn’t, son! You’d be slinking around in a suit of old clothes that you were ashamed of and hating fellows who dressed decently. And you’d know two or three fellows like yourself and no one else. That’s how near you’d be to what you are now.”
“You talk like a—a snob!”