ork. That kind of thing would be impossible
here."

"My dear young lady, there you wrong us."

"Do I?"

"Certainly! A Prime Minister with us might as easily come from the
same class."

"Here you think so much of rank. You are--a Duke."

"But a Prime Minister can make a Duke; and if a man can raise himself
by his own intellect to that position, no one will think of his
father or his grandfather. The sons of merchants have with us been
Prime Ministers more than once, and no Englishmen ever were more
honoured among their countrymen. Our peerage is being continually
recruited from the ranks of the people, and hence it gets its
strength."

"Is it so?"

"There is no greater mistake than to suppose that inferiority of
birth is a barrier to success in this country."

She listened to this and to much more on the same subject with
attentive ears,--not shaken in her ideas as to the English
aristocracy in general, but thinking that she was perhaps learning
something of his own individual opinions. If he were more liberal
than others, on that liberality might perhaps be based her own
happiness and fortune.

He, in all this, was quite unconscious of the working of her mind.
Nor in discussing such matters generally did he ever mingle his own
private feelings, his own pride of race and name, his own ideas of
what was due to his ancient rank with the political creed by which
his conduct in public life was governed. The peer who sat next to him
in the House of Lords, whose grandmother had been a washerwoman and
whose father an innkeeper, was to him every whit as good a peer as
himself. And he would as soon sit in counsel with Mr. Monk, whose
father had risen from a mechanic to be a merchant, as with any
nobleman who could count ancestors against himself. But there was an
inner feeling in his bosom as to his own family, his own name, his
own children, and his own personal self, which was kept altogether
apart from his grand political theories. It was a subject on which
he never spoke; but the feeling had come to him as a part of his
birthright. And he conceived that it would pass through him to his
children after the same fashion. It was this which made the idea of
a marriage between his daughter and Tregear intolerable to him, and
which would operate as strongly in regard to any marriage which
his son might contemplate. Lord Grex was not a man with whom he
would wish to form any intimacy. He was, we may say, a wretched
unp