"My own answer would be that of
many another: I 'm the son of a man who bore the same name, and who,
if alive, would tell the same story. As to what we are, that's another
question," added he, shrewdly; "though, to be sure, English life
and habits have established a very easy way of treating the matter.
Everybody with no visible means of support, and who does nothing for his
own subsistence, is either a gentleman or a vagrant. If he be positively
and utterly unable to do anything for himself, he 's a gentleman; if he
can do a stroke of work in some line or other, he 's only a vagrant."

"And you, papa?" asked she, with an accent as calm and unconcerned as
might be.

"I?--I am a little of both, perhaps," said he, after a pause.

A silence ensued, long enough to be painful to each; Lizzy did not dare
to repeat her question, although it still remained unanswered, and Davis
knew well that he had not met it frankly, as he promised. What a severe
struggle was that his mind now endured! The hoarded secret of his whole
life,--the great mystery to which he had sacrificed all the happiness of
a home, for which he had consented to estrange himself from his child,
training her up amidst associations and habits every one of which
increased the distance between them,--there it was now on his lip; a
word might reveal it, and by its utterance might be blasted all the
fondest hopes his heart had ever cherished. To make Lizzy a lady, to
surround her not only with all the wants and requirements of station,
but to imbue her mind with sentiments and modes of thought such as befit
that condition, had been the devoted labor of his life. For this he had
toiled and struggled, contrived, plotted, and schemed for years long.
What terrible scenes had he not encountered, with what desperate
characters not associated! In the fearful commerce of the play-table
there was not a dark passion of the human heart he had not explored,--to
know men in their worst aspects, in their insolence of triumph, the
meanness of their defeat, in their moments of avarice, in their waste;
to read their natures so that every start or sigh, a motion of the
finger, a quivering of the lip should have its significance; to
perceive, as by an instinct, wherein the craft or subtlety of each lay,
and by the same rapid intuition to know his weak point also! Men have
won high collegiate honors with less intensity of study than he gave to
this dark pursuit; men have come out of b