irl came
and took the bowl.

"I'll get it for you. You go right ahead and give it to him, Mr.
Barrow. He's the new boarder--Mr. Tracy--and I'd just got to where it
was getting too deep for me."

"Much obliged if you will, Hattie. I was coming to borrow of the boys."
He sat down at his ease on an old trunk, and said, "I've been listening
and got interested; and as I was saying, I wouldn't go on, if I were you.
You see where you are coming to, don't you? Calling yourself a lady
doesn't elect you; that is what you were going to say; and you saw that
if you said it you were going to run right up against another difference
that you hadn't thought of: to-wit, Whose right is it to do the electing?
Over there, twenty thousand people in a million elect themselves
gentlemen and ladies, and the nine hundred and eighty thousand accept
that decree and swallow the affront which it puts upon them. Why, if
they didn't accept it, it wouldn't be an election, it would be a dead
letter and have no force at all. Over here the twenty thousand would-be
exclusives come up to the polls and vote themselves to be ladies and
gentlemen. But the thing doesn't stop there. The nine hundred and
eighty thousand come and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen too,
and that elects the whole nation. Since the whole million vote
themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that
election. It does make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about
it; while over yonder the inequality, (by decree of the infinitely
feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute--as real
and absolute as our equality."

Tracy had shrunk promptly into his English shell when this speech began,
notwithstanding he had now been in severe training several weeks for
contact and intercourse with the common herd on the common herd's terms;
but he lost no time in pulling himself out again, and so by the time the
speech was finished his valves were open once more, and he was forcing
himself to accept without resentment the common herd's frank fashion of
dropping sociably into other people's conversations unembarrassed and
uninvited. The process was not very difficult this time, for the man's
smile and voice and manner were persuasive and winning. Tracy would even
have liked him on the spot, but for the fact--fact which he was not
really aware of--that the equality of men was not yet a reality to him,
it was only a theory; the mind percei