another man, "to belong to the lowest class of our people--a
class so low that even the negro slaves sneered at and despised it; to
be born to a dirt floor, and a rotten board roof and four log walls! A
goodly heritage, is it not? Was not Providence kind to me? And is it not
a just and kind Providence?"

He laughed with concentrated bitterness, and a feeling of pity for this
man whom he had been dreading so much stole over Prescott.

"We talk of freedom and equality here in the South," continued the
Secretary, "and we say we are fighting for it; but not in England itself
is class feeling stronger, and that is what we are fighting to
perpetuate. I say that you have no such childhood as mine to look back
to--the squalour, the ignorance, the sin, the misery, and above all the
knowledge that you have a brain in your head and the equal knowledge
that you are forbidden to use it--that places and honours are not for
you!"

Again he fiercely kicked a clump of snow from his path and gazed
absently across the fields toward the wintry horizon, his face full of
passionate protestation. Prescott was still silent, his own position
forgotten now in the interest aroused by this sudden outburst.

"If you are born a clod it is best to be a clod," continued the
Secretary, "but that I was not. As I said, I have a brain in my head,
and eyes to see. From the first I despised the squalour and the misery
around me, and resolved to rise above it despite all the barriers of a
slave-holding aristocracy, the most exclusive aristocracy in the world.
I thought of nothing else. You do not know my struggles; you cannot
guess them--the years and the years and all the bitter nights. They say
that any oppressed and despised race learns and practises craft and
cunning. So does a man; he must--he has no other choice.

"I learned craft and cunning and practised them, too, because I had to
do so. I did things that you have never done because you were not driven
to them, and at last I saw the seed that I had planted begin to grow.
Then I felt a joy that you can never feel because you have never worked
for an object, and never will work for it, as I have done. I have
triumphed. The best in the South obey me because they must. It is not
the title or the name, for there are those higher than mine, but it is
the power, the feeling that I have the reins in my hand and can guide."

"If you have won your heart's desire why do you rail at fate?" asked
Prescott