back to my father in Ireland. That's my history. There's not
much blue blood in me.... I believe if one went back.... Bah, if
one went back! Why deceive myself? I was born a peasant, and I know
it.... Yet no one looks more like a gentleman; reversion to some
original ancestor, I suppose. Not one of these earls looks more like
a gentleman than I. But I don't suppose my looks would in any measure
reconcile them to the fact of my possession of their property.

"Ah, you old fools--periwigs, armour, and scrolls--you old fools, you
laboured only to make a gentleman of an Irish peasant. Yes, you
laboured in vain, my noble lords--you, old gentleman yonder, you with
the telescope--an admiral, no doubt--you sailed the seas in vain; and
you over there, you mediaeval-looking cuss, you carried your armour
through the battles of Cressy and Poictiers in vain; and you, noble
lady in the high bodice, you whose fingers play with the flaxen curls
of that boy--he was the heir of this place two hundred years ago--I
say, you bore him in vain, your labour was in vain; and you, old
fogey that you are, you in the red coat, you holding the letter in
your gouty fingers, a commercial-looking letter, you laboured in
trade to rehabilitate the falling fortunes of the family, and I say
you too laboured in vain. Without labour, without ache, I possess the
result of all your centuries of labour.

"There, that sordid, wizen old lady, a miser to judge by her
appearance, she is eyeing me maliciously now, but I say all her
eyeing is in vain; she pinched and scraped and starved herself for
me. Yes, I possess all your savings, and if you were fifty years
younger you would not begrudge them to me."

Laughing at his folly, Mike said, "How close together lie the sane
and the insane; any one who had overheard me would have pronounced me
mad as a March hare, and yet few are saner." He walked twice across
the room. "But I'm mad for the moment, and I like to be mad. Have I
not all things--talent, wealth, love? I asked for life, and I was
given life. I have drunk the cup--no, not to the dregs, there is
plenty more wine in the cup for me; the cup is full, I have not
tasted it yet. Lily! yes, I must get her; a fool I have been; my
letter miscarried, else she would have written. Refuse me! who would
refuse me? Yes, I was born to drink the cup of life as few have drunk
it; I shall drink it even like a Roman emperor ... But they drank it
to madness and crime! Yet even