rwise, prince or peasant, each is a man, whether
he wears a blouse or a star and garter; and if man was made in the
image of God, let us do no indignity to that image in one or in
another."

Did I understand him? Was Colonel Vorse proclaiming himself the equal
of Prince San Sorcererino who had entertained us in his palaces last
year? Well. And was he not? All at once something seemed to sift away
from before my eyes--a veil that had hidden my kind from me. Was there
no longer even that natural aristocracy in which Shakspeare or Homer
or Dante was king? Was the world a brotherhood, and they the public
enemy, the enemy of the great perfect race to come, who helped one
brother take advantage of another? Were those ribbons in the
buttonhole, the gifts of kings, of no more worth than the ribbons of
cigars?

Mrs. Montresor was toying with her fan beside me, and talking in an
undertone behind it. "What prince of all that you have seen or read
of," said she, "if born on a meagre mountain farm, would have made his
fortune and have educated himself, as this man has done? I think the
kings who founded races of kings were like him. And what prince of
them all alive looks so much the prince as he? This one as fat as
Falstaff and as low, that one with a hump on his back, the other
without brains, the next with brains awry, and none of them made as
becomes a man. Tell me, Helena?"

"I think you are in love yourself," I said.

She laughed. "As tall as Saul, as dark, as lordly in all proportions,
as gentle as Jonathan, and with a soul like David's--why shouldn't I
be?" she said. "And he not the equal of the granddaughter of a South
Carolina planter! Tell me again, Helena, what has she ever done to
prove herself his equal?"

She had had a fancy--Heaven knows why--that her young mother, who had
run away with her father, was the daughter of a noble foreign family;
or else why should the match have been clandestine? She had had a
fancy that she was therefore noble, as her mother was--the mother even
whose name her child did not know other than as the slaves had told
her the young bridegroom called her Pansy because of a pair of
purple-dark eyes. That was about all. That was all the answer I could
have made, had I spoken, to her gentle raillery, half mockery, in
which she did not quite believe herself. But even were it so, and the
daughter noble as the mother, could blood that had filtered through
generations of oppressors lounging in