The man she had seized laughed shortly, amused at her bewildered face.
"Oh," he said, "we English are frightfully cock-a-hoop over our pedigrees. We don't remember it's they who are condescending to us. There's bluer and better blood across the Atlantic than any of ours, and it isn't smirched. They don't boast. They don't remind us of our blotted scutcheons.—We to talk of race!"
"What on earth do you mean, Kilgour?" said the Duchess. "Half of them are Huns and Finns, and the scum of Europe."
The big man was leaning against the door-post; his bantering tongue took on a sudden heat.
"A few," he said. "But the rest—! Scum, Duchess?—We're the dregs. There's not one of our great families that isn't mixed with the blood of traitors; that hasn't at one time or another sold its honour or stained its sword. Scots and English, all that was best of us once, are there, handing their valour down. After Culloden the country was drained of its gentlemen. Why, you can still hear the Highland tongue in South Carolina.... They went into exile while we hugged our estates and truckled to an usurper. And the soul of a country is the soul of its heroes.... Oh, I believe in race!—Let the rest of us take a pride in our tarnished titles and wonder at the fineness of strangers who are descended from the men who lost all for the sake of honour and loyalty to their King!"
The Duchess dropped her blunt voice into a lower key.
"Poor old Kilgour," she said. "You're thinking of that little brute Tillinghame and his dollar princess."
"Well!" he said, between his teeth. "You've only to look at them!—And his people sneer at her for aspiring to bear an illustrious title that began in dishonour, and has been dragged a few hundred years in the mud—!"
The Duchess moved away from the door; she had remembered Susan.
"I wish you'd capture Barnaby and send him in to his wife," she said. "He has forgotten that she exists.... I've had to make up a message.... I couldn't stand the dumb wistfulness in her face. It's a foolhardy business."