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.