"I've been getting my eyes opened," he answered. "I never ought to have listened to them. I never ought to have gone up there. I did say something to Miss Sylvia I had no business to. If I'd been one of her own kind, instead of the son of a livery stable keeper, I'd have got polite regrets or something. It's made me realize how low I am."
"No," she said with quick maternal passion. "You're not low. Maybe some day those people'll be no better than we are."
He shook his head.
"I'd rather I was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up with it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help do the treating."
"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the mare go."
But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than that; something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for one's self.
"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.
She glanced up quickly.
"Who's that?"
A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery: