"No, it is clear that you are not!" Sophia answered.
"But I am a gentleman."
"The question is, are you?" she retorted. "There are gentlemen and gentlemen. What is your claim to that name, sir?"
"S'help me, ma'am!" he exclaimed, affecting the utmost surprise and indignation. "The Fanshaws of Warwickshire have been commonly taken for such."
"The Fanshaws of Warwickshire?"
"Yes, my lady."
"Perhaps so. It may be so. I do not know them. But the Fanshaws of nowhere in particular? Or shall I say the Lanes of Piccadilly?"
His face flamed scarlet below the black wig. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His eyes flickered as if she had threatened to strike him. For a moment he was a pitiable sight. Then with a prodigious effort, "I--I don't know what you are talking about," he muttered hoarsely. "I don't understand you, ma'am." But his smile was sickly, and his eye betrayed his misery.
"Don't lie, sir," Sophia said sternly; and, poor little wretch, found out and exposed, he writhed under her look of scorn. "We know who you are, a tradesman's son, parading in borrowed plumes. What we do not know, what we cannot understand," she continued with ineffable disdain, "is how you can think to find favour in a lady's eyes. In a lady's eyes--you! An under-bred, over-dressed apprentice, who have never done anything to raise yourself from the rank in which you were born! Do you know, have you an idea, sir, what you are in our eyes? Do you know that a lady would rather marry her footman; for, at least, he is a man. If you do not, you must be taught, sir, as the puppy is taught with the whip. Do you understand me?"
In his deserved degradation, his eyes sought Lady Betty's face. She was looking at him gravely; he read no hope in her eyes. What the other woman told him then was true; and, ah, how he hated her! Ah, how he hated her! He did not know that she scourged in him another's offence. He did not know that of her scorn a measure fell on her own shoulders; that she had been deluded by such an one as he was himself. Above all, he did not know that she was resolved that the child with her should not suffer as she had suffered!