For the Great Plantagenet Delusion which Edmund Plantagenet had started, and only half or a quarter believed in himself, became to his children from youth upward, and especially to Maud and Dick, a sort of family religion. It was a theory on which they based almost everything that was best and truest within them; a moral power for good, urging them always on to do credit to the great House from which they firmly and unquestioningly believed themselves to be sprung. Probably the moral impulse was there first by nature; probably, too, they inherited it, not from poor, drunken, do-nothing Edmund Plantagenet himself, through whom ostensibly they should have derived their Plantagenet character, but from that good and patient nobody, their hard-working mother. But none of these things ever occurred at all to Maud or Dick; to them it had always been a prime article of faith that _noblesse oblige_, and that their lives must be noble in order to come up to a preconceived Plantagenet standard of action. So the blow was a crushing one. It was as though all the ground of their being had been cut away from beneath their feet. They had fancied themselves so long the children of kings, with a moral obligation upon them to behave--well, as the children of kings are little given to behaving; and they had found out now they were mere ordinary mortals, with only the same inherent and universal reasons for right and high action as the common herd of us. It was a sad comedown--for a royal Plantagenet. The revulsion was terrible. And Maud, who was in some ways the prouder of the two, and to whom, as to most of her sex, the extrinsic reason for holding up her head in the midst of poverty and disgrace had ever been stronger and more cogent than the intrinsic one, felt it much the more keenly. To women, the social side of things is always uppermost. They journeyed home in a constant turmoil of unrelieved wretchedness; they were not, they had never been, royal Plantagenots. Just like all the rest of the world--mere ordinary people! And they who had been sustained, under privations and shame, by the reflection that, if every man had his right, Dick would have been sitting that day on the divided throne of half these islands! Descendants, after all, of a cobbler and a dancing-master! No Black Prince at all in their lineage--no Henry, no Edward, no Richard, no Lionel! Cour-de-Lion a pale shade--Lackland himself taken away from them! And how everybody would laugh when they came to know the truth! Though that was a small matter. It was no minor thing like this, but the downfall of a faith, the ruin, of a principle, the break-up of a rule in life, that really counted!