“So that they suffer from being excluded as inferiors?”
“Oh, I assure you they don’t feel themselves inferior! They consider themselves as good as anybody. There are some very interesting characters among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to. That’s her brother, standing there with her—that tall, gaunt young man with a Roman face; it’s such a common type here in the mountains. Their father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last battles that he was promoted. He was badly wounded, but he never took a pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now the son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The daughter takes in sewing, and in that way they manage to make both ends meet. The girl is really a first-rate seamstress, and so cheap! I give her a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She’s very fond of reading; the mother is an invalid, but she reads aloud while the daughter sews, and you’ve no idea how many books they get through. When she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have her sit down; it’s hard to realize that she isn’t a lady. I’m a good deal criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts notions into such people’s heads, if you meet them in that way; they’re pretty free and independent as it is. But when I’m with Lizzie I forget that there is any difference between us; I can’t help loving the child. You must take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They’ve got the father’s sword hung up over the head of the mother’s bed; it’s very touching. But the poor little place is so bare!”
Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a question she had the effect of having kept back.
“There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true that everybody in Altruria does some kind of manual labor?”
“Why, certainly,” he answered, quite as if he had been an American.
“Ladies, too? Or perhaps you have none.”
I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian had taken it ill. “Perhaps we had better try to understand each other clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as they have in England—”
“No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions,” said Mrs. Makely, with a republican fervor that did my heart good. “It is a word that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person.”
“But you said just now that you sometimes forgot that your seamstress was not a lady. Just what did you mean by that?”
Mrs. Makely hesitated. “I meant—I suppose I meant—that she had not the surroundings of a lady; the social traditions.”