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“In our own class! I wonder what is our own class?” said Law, with a scornful sense of the weakness of the position. “Would you like me to take a hand in old O’Shaughnessy’s rubber, or read the papers to old Dalrymple? They are half as old again as the governor himself. I suppose that’s what you call my own class.”

Lottie felt that she had laid herself open to defeat, and the consciousness subdued her greatly. She sat down again on her little chair, and looked up at him as he stood leaning upon the door, red with indignation at her onslaught. Lottie herself was flushed with the exertion and the shame of having thus afforded him an opportunity for a scoff. She eluded the dilemma as he proposed it, however, and flung herself back into the larger question: “You are grown up,” she said, indignantly; “a great big boy, looking like a man. It is a disgrace to you to be dependent on papa. It would be a good thing for you, a very good thing, if he were to—marry, as you say, and cast you off, and force you to work for yourself. What else have I been saying to you for years?”