But, although she was not interested, she peered about sleepily for an answer.

Her thoughts, in a lazy fashion, tumbled in her, like waves without wind--which, indeed, was all the sort of thinking she knew.

At last, with the decision of conscious superiority, and the judicial air afforded by the precision of utterance belonging to her class--a precision so strangely conjoined with the lack of truth and logic both--she said, in a tone that gave to the merest puerility the consequence of a judgment between contending sages: "The difference is, that the nobleman is born to ease and dignity and affluence, and the--shopkeeper to buy and sell for his living." "Many a nobleman," suggested Mary, "buys and sells without the necessity of making a living." "That is the difference," said Hesper.
"Then the nobleman buys and sells to make money, and the shopkeeper to make a living ?" "Yes," granted Hesper, lazily.
"Which is the nobler end--to live, or to make money ?" But this question was too far beyond Hesper.

She did not even choose to hear it.
"And," she said, resuming her definition instead, "the nobleman deals with great things, the shopkeeper with small." "When things are finally settled," said Mary--"Gracious, Mary!" cried Hesper, "what do you mean?
Are not things settled for good this many a century?
I am afraid I have been harboring an awful radical!--a--what do they call it ?--a communist!" She would have turned the whole matter out of doors, for she was tired of it.
"Things hardly look as if they were going to remain just as they are at this precise moment," said Mary.

"How could they, when, from the very making of the world, they have been going on changing and changing, hardly ever even seeming to standstill ?" "You frighten me, Mary! You will do something terrible in my house, and I shall get the blame of it!" said Hesper, laughing.
But she did in truth feel a little uncomfortable.