"You _call_ yourself a lady, but--" "I do nothing of the kind," interrupted Mary, sharply.

"I should _like_ to be a lady; and inside of me, please God, I _will_ be a lady; but I leave it to other people to call me this or that.

It matters little what any one is _called_." "All right," returned George, a little cowed; "I don't mean to contradict you.

Only just tell me why a well-to-do tradesman shouldn't be a gentleman as well as a small yeoman like Wardour." "Why don't you say--as well as a squire, or an earl, or a duke ?" said Mary.
"There you are, chaffing me again! It's hard enough to have every fool of a lawyer's clerk, or a doctor's boy, looking down upon a fellow, and calling him a counter-jumper; but, upon my soul, it's too bad when a girl in the same shop hasn't a civil word for him, because he isn't what she counts a gentleman! Isn't my father a gentleman?
Answer me that, Mary." It was one of George's few good things that he had a great opinion of his father, though the grounds of it were hardly such as to enable Mary to answer his appeal in a way he would have counted satisfactory.

She thought of her own father, and was silent.
"Everything depends on what a man is in himself, George," she answered.
"Mr.Wardour would be a gentleman all the same if he were a shopkeeper or a blacksmith." "And shouldn't I be as good a gentleman as Mr.Wardour, if I had been born with an old tumble-down house on my back, and a few acres of land I could do with as I liked?
Come, answer me that." "If it be the house and the land that makes the difference, you would, of course," answered Mary.
Her tone implied, even to George's rough perceptions, that there was a good deal more of a difference between them than therein lay.