"All the same," I maintained, "don't you think that there ought to be
some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause
and the gravity of--"

"Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!" she scornfully cried.
"People of our class can't descend--"

"Well, but," I interrupted, "then you give the coal-heavers the palm for
discrimination."

"How's that?"

"Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for
lighter ones he--gets a bruise over the left eye."

"You don't meet it, you don't meet it! What is an insult ever but an
insult?"

"Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees--insolence, impudence,
impertinence, liberties, rudeness--all different."

She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. "You in the North."

"Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes,
even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it's only
the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence;
while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich."

"You in the North!" she repeated. "And so your Northern eyes can't
see it, after all!" At these words my intelligence sailed into a great
blank, while she continued: "Frankly--and forgive me for saying it--I
was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it."

"But see what?" I barked in my despair.

She did not help me. "If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted
me more than that. And that's what you don't see," she regretfully
finished. "It seems so strange."

I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested
upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain
remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of
the cave-dwelling man.

"You comprehend so much," she meditated slowly, aloud; "you've been such
an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the
same as ours." She was still surveying me with the specimen expression,
when it suddenly left her. "Do you mean to sit there and tell me," she
broke out, "that you wouldn't have resented it yourself?"

"O dear!" my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have
been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady
Baltimore, I can form no impression.

"Put yourself in his place," the girl continued.

"Ah," I gasped, "that is always so easy to say and so hard to do."

My remark proved not a happy one. Sh