“How is it about your swineherd, who changed his rough straw hat for a triple crown, and had the royalty and nobility of centuries come to kiss the foot that once hadn’t even a shoe to it?”
“Oh!” she replied, “the church is the beginning of the kingdom of heaven on earth, and the meek and the poor in spirit possess it already. Besides, I always make exception of those whom God has especially endowed with gifts of nature or
grace, or with both. Besides, again, this man did not seek greatness; it was conferred on him.”
Isabel felt called on to show her colors.
“America for ever!” she said. “Europe will do very well for the great, and for those who are willing to remain small; but in my country there’s a fair field for everybody. Everybody there is born to as high a position as he can work his way to, and his destiny is not in the beginning of his life, but in the end of it. We are like Adams and Eves new-made, and dominion is given us over the garden of the new world.”
She paused for breath, and the Signora applauded. “Brava! I am willing you should defeat me. I will call America not only the garden, but the nursery-garden, of the new world, if you like. Long live your seedlings!”
“How would you like it,” the girl went on, rather red in the cheeks—“how would you like it, if you had been born in some very humble position in life, instead of in the position of a lady, to have some one tell you not to try to rise, but to stay where you were? Just take it to yourself.”
“If I had been so born I should have been a different sort of person, and cannot say how I should have felt,” the Signora replied tranquilly. “If I had been a product of generations of obedience, instead of generations of command, do not you see that the marriages would have been different, the habits, the traditions, the education, everything but the immortal spark and the common human nature? Or, if I had been like what I am now, I think I should have looked for, and found, the beauties and pleasures in my path.” She had been speaking
very quietly, but here she drew herself up a little, and a slight color rose to her face as she went on: “I have never striven for any of those things the chase of which seems so mean to me. It has never occurred to me that I might be honored by any association, except with a person either very good or very highly gifted by nature. The only rank which impresses me is that in the church. For the rest—you have heard the expression, ‘a distinction without a difference.’”
Isabel gave a puzzled sigh. “I never could understand you,” she said, a little impatiently. “Sometimes you seem to me the haughtiest of women; sometimes I think you not half proud enough. One moment you seem to be a red republican, the next an aristocrat. I can’t make out what you really are. You graduate your bows to an inch, according to the rank you salute. I’ve seen your eyes flash lightning at a person for being too familiar toward you; and then I find you talking about the rights of the people almost like a communist.”