amazing, I believe you are insane, my son. See here
--have you been training with that ass again--that radical, if you prefer
the term, though the words are synonymous--Lord Tanzy, of Tollmache?"

The son did not reply, and the old lord continued:

"Yes, you confess. That puppy, that shame to his birth and caste, who
holds all hereditary lordships and privilege to be usurpation, all
nobility a tinsel sham, all aristocratic institutions a fraud, all
inequalities in rank a legalized crime and an infamy, and no bread honest
bread that a man doesn't earn by his own work--work, pah!"--and the old
patrician brushed imaginary labor-dirt from his white hands. "You have
come to hold just those opinions yourself, suppose,"--he added with a
sneer.

A faint flush in the younger man's cheek told that the shot had hit and
hurt; but he answered with dignity:

"I have. I say it without shame--I feel none. And now my reason for
resolving to renounce my heirship without resistance is explained.
I wish to retire from what to me is a false existence, a false position,
and begin my life over again--begin it right--begin it on the level of
mere manhood, unassisted by factitious aids, and succeed or fail by pure
merit or the want of it. I will go to America, where all men are equal
and all have an equal chance; I will live or die, sink or swim, win or
lose as just a man--that alone, and not a single helping gaud or fiction
back of it."

"Hear, hear!" The two men looked each other steadily in the eye a moment
or two, then the elder one added, musingly, "Ab-so-lutely
cra-zy-ab-solutely!" After another silence, he said, as one who, long
troubled by clouds, detects a ray of sunshine, "Well, there will be one
satisfaction--Simon Lathets will come here to enter into his own, and I
will drown him in the horsepond. That poor devil--always so humble in
his letters, so pitiful, so deferential; so steeped in reverence for our
great line and lofty-station; so anxious to placate us, so prayerful for
recognition as a relative, a bearer in his veins of our sacred blood
--and withal so poor, so needy, so threadbare and pauper-shod as to
raiment, so despised, so laughed at for his silly claimantship by the
lewd American scum around him--ah, the vulgar, crawling, insufferable
tramp! To read one of his cringing, nauseating letters--well?"

This to a splendid flunkey, all in inflamed plush and buttons and
knee-breeches as to his trunk, and a gli