"I should
_like_ to be a lady; and inside of me, please God, I
_will_ be a lady; but I leave it to other people to call me
this or that. It matters little what any one is _called_."
"All right," returned George, a little cowed; "I don't mean to
contradict you. Only just tell me why a well-to-do tradesman
shouldn't be a gentleman as well as a small yeoman like Wardour."
"Why don't you say--as well as a squire, or an earl, or a duke?"
said Mary.
"There you are, chaffing me again! It's hard enough to have every
fool of a lawyer's clerk, or a doctor's boy, looking down upon a
fellow, and calling him a counter-jumper; but, upon my soul, it's
too bad when a girl in the same shop hasn't a civil word for him,
because he isn't what she counts a gentleman! Isn't my father a
gentleman? Answer me that, Mary."
It was one of George's few good things that he had a great
opinion of his father, though the grounds of it were hardly such
as to enable Mary to answer his appeal in a way he would have
counted satisfactory. She thought of her own father, and was
silent.
"Everything depends on what a man is in himself, George," she
answered. "Mr. Wardour would be a gentleman all the same if he
were a shopkeeper or a blacksmith."
"And shouldn't I be as good a gentleman as Mr. Wardour, if I had
been born with an old tumble-down house on my back, and a few
acres of land I could do with as I liked? Come, answer me that.
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