!" rejoined George, contemptuously. "You _call_ yourself a
lady, but--"

"I do nothing of the kind," interrupted Mary, sharply. "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."

"If it be the house and the land that makes the difference, you would,
of course," answered Mary.

Her tone implied, even to George's rough perceptions, that there was a
good deal more of a difference between them than therein lay. But
common people, whether lords or shopkeepers, are slow to understand
that possession, whether in the shape of birth, or lands, or money, or
intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.

"I know you don't think me fit to hold a candle to him," he said. "But
I happen to know, for all he rides such a good horse, he's not above
doing the work of a wretched menial, for he polishes his own
stirrup-irons."

"I'm very glad to hear it," rejoined Mary. "He must be more of a
gentleman yet than I thought him."

"Then why should you count him a better gentleman than me?"

"I'm afraid for one thing, you would go with your stirrup-irons rusty,
rather