regarva waiting for him. That worthy personage
bowed to Lancelot reverently and distantly.

'I am quite ashamed to intrude myself upon you, sir, but I could not
rest without coming to ask whether you have had any news.'--He broke
down at this point in the sentence, but Lancelot understood him.

'I have no news,' he said. 'But what do you mean by standing off in
that way, as if we were not old and fast friends? Remember, I am as
poor as you are now; you may look me in the face and call me your
equal, if you will, or your inferior; I shall not deny it.'

'Pardon me, sir,' answered Tregarva; 'but I never felt what a real
substantial thing rank is, as I have since this sad misfortune of
yours.'

'And I have never till now found out its worthlessness.'

'You're wrong, sir, you are wrong; look at the difference between
yourself and me. When you've lost all you have, and seven times
more, you're still a gentleman. No man can take that from you. You
may look the proudest duchess in the land in the face, and claim her
as your equal; while I, sir,--I don't mean, though, to talk of
myself--but suppose that you had loved a pious and a beautiful lady,
and among all your worship of her, and your awe of her, had felt
that you were worthy of her, that you could become her comforter,
and her pride, and her joy, if it wasn't for that accursed gulf that
men had put between you, that you were no gentleman; that you didn't
know how to walk, and how to pronounce, and when to speak, and when
to be silent, not even how to handle your own knife and fork without
disgusting her, or how to keep your own body clean and sweet--Ah,
sir, I see it now as I never did before, what a wall all these
little defects build up round a poor man; how he longs and struggles
to show himself as he is at heart, and cannot, till he feels
sometimes as if he was enchanted, pent up, like folks in fairy
tales, in the body of some dumb beast. But, sir,' he went on, with
a concentrated bitterness which Lancelot had never seen in him
before, 'just because this gulf which rank makes is such a deep one,
therefore it looks to me all the more devilish; not that I want to
pull down any man to my level; I despise my own level too much; I
want to rise; I want those like me to rise with me. Let the rich be
as rich as they will.--I, and those like me, covet not money, but
manners. Why should not the workman be a gentleman, and a workman