, all the finicky, finger-dusting
gentry with the "fine souls," who flatter themselves that their timidity is
the squeamishness of superior sensibilities--I see all these feeble folk
fluttering their feeble fingers in horror of me. "The brute!" they cry;
"the bounder!" Well, I accept the names quite cheerfully. Those are the
epithets the wishy-washy always hurl at the strong; they put me in the
small and truly aristocratic class of men who _do_. I proudly avow
myself no subscriber to the code that was made by the shearers to encourage
the sheep to keep on being nice docile animals, trotting meekly up to
be shorn or slaughtered as their masters may decide. I harm no man, and
no woman; but neither do I pause to weep over any man or any woman who
flings himself or herself upon my steady spear. I try to be courteous and
considerate to all; but I do not stop when some fellow who has something
that belongs to me shouts "Rude!" at me to sheer me off.

At the same time, her delicate beauty, her quiet, distinctive, high-bred
manner, had thrust it home to me that in certain respects I was ignorant
and crude--as who would not have been, brought up as was I? I knew there
was, somewhere between my roughness of the uncut individuality and the
smoothness of the planed and sand-papered nonentity of her "set," a mean,
better than either, better because more efficient.

When this was clear to me I sent for my trainer. He was one of those spare,
wiry Englishmen, with skin like tanned and painted hide--brown except
where the bones seem about to push their sharp angles through, and there
a frosty, winter-apple red. He dressed like a Deadwood gambler, he talked
like a stable boy; but for all that, you couldn't fail to see he was a
gentleman born and bred. Yes, he was a gentleman, though he mixed profanity
into his ordinary flow of conversation more liberally than did I when in a
rage.

I stood up before him, threw my coat back, thrust my thumbs into my
trousers pockets and slowly turned about like a ready-made tailor's dummy.
"Monson," said I, "what do you think of me?"

He looked me over as if I were a horse he was about to buy. "Sound, I'd
say," was his verdict. "Good wind--uncommon good wind. A goer, and a
stayer. Not a lump. Not a hair out of place." He laughed. "Action a bit
high perhaps--for the track. But a grand reach."

"I know all that," said I. "You miss my point. Suppose you wanted to enter
me for--say, the Society Sweepstake