ays down or one who tears up paving-stones." But I had
only laughed again. She plumed herself on being cosmopolitan even to
her principles.

"You give me credit for too much thinking on the subject," I said, "if
it is credit. Indeed, I don't concern myself about such people; and as
for marrying one of them, I could as soon marry into a different race,
African or Mongolian. They are a different race."

And I remembered all this as Colonel Vorse stood leaning his hand
above me on the jamb of the window-frame--for although I was tall, he
was a son of Anak--with that air which, never vaunting strength,
always made you aware of its repression. I could fancy hearing Mrs.
Montresor say, "That air of his! it always fetches women!" for she
loved a little slang, by some antipodal attraction of her refinement,
and I instinctively stiffened myself, determined it should never fetch
_me_. And here he was calling his allies, the spirits and powers of
the dark and terrible mountain heights and depths, and openly giving
battle. I don't know why it depressed me; I felt as if the very fact
that it did was a half surrender; I looked up at him a moment; I
forgot who he was; I wished he was as poor as I. But to become the
mother of Rhoda, my friend, and of Merivale, that laughing young
giant--what absurdity, if all the rest were equal! And that other, the
dead woman, the first wife--should one not always be jealous of that
sweet early love? Could one endure it? Here among these hills with all
their ghostliness she would haunt me. And then I turned and swept away
to the fireside, holding out my hands to the flame, and glad to sink
into the chair that some one had left empty there.

I hardly knew what world I was living in when, perhaps a half-hour
later, I heard Colonel Vorse's voice. "The trouble is that men are
_not_ born free and equal," he was saying. "Free? They are hampered by
inheritance and circumstance from the moment of birth. Equal? It is a
self-evident lie. And the world has rhapsodized for a hundred years
over so clumsy a statement. All men are born with equal rights. That
is the precise statement. My rights--rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness--are equal to the rights of all the princelings
of the earth; their rights equal only to mine. So far as they
interfere with my rights they are public enemies, and are to be dealt
with; and so far as I interfere with their rights, I am a trespasser
to be punished. Othe