Richard Fairfax was his friend; he was a gentleman--yes, no doubt, in himself a gentleman--but not as the Markhams were gentlemen. He was a nobody; he was the son of a nobody. He did not belong to the Fairfaxes of the north or of the south. He had a good name, but no more. What had such a fellow to do in Alice Markham’s company? Spears at the Chase was an eccentricity of his own, which made Paul feel himself above prejudice, and nobly superior to the conventional maxims of society; but Fairfax there affronted his pride. The two things were quite different. The same rules did not seem to apply to the noble working man, who was above them, as to the gentleman who was only a gentleman in his own right. That his mother should have formed a kind of alliance with this young man (though his own friend) irritated him beyond measure. Women were so easily taken in. Good manners, and a look of good breeding--so easily acquired nowadays when everybody is formed in the same mould, and all kinds of people can achieve the hall-mark of public schools and universities,--was enough to take in a woman. Had Paul been consulted, no such person should have entered the sacred precincts. Yet Paul was a democrat, on the verge of surrendering everything, and throwing in his fortunes with a little communistic party! The inconsistency did not strike him, or if it ever stole across his mind, he repelled the consciousness with a hot protestation within himself that it was not at all the same thing. That Spears should be his equal was a thing to fight for, a thing that could never derange the inborn sense of aristocracy; but that Fairfax, who was so near his equal, should be his equal--therein lies the danger, which instinct seizes upon, which rouses pride in arms.