“Now _what_ an idea. There’s nothing in a title except what is _put_ into it—you’ve said that yourself. Suppose the title is _clean_, instead of lady. You get that?” “I believe so. Instead of speaking of a woman as a _lady_, you substitute clean and say she’s a clean person.” “That’s it. In England the swell folks don’t speak of the working people as gentlemen and ladies?” “Oh, no.” “And the working people don’t call _themselves_ gentlemen and ladies?” “Certainly not.” “So if you used the other word there wouldn’t be any change. The swell people wouldn’t call anybody but themselves ‘clean,’ and those others would drop sort of meekly into their way of talking and _they_ wouldn’t call themselves clean. We don’t do that way here. Everybody calls himself a lady or gentleman, and thinks he _is_, and don’t care what anybody else thinks him, so long as he don’t say it out loud. You think there’s no difference. You _knuckle down_ and we _don’t_. Ain’t that a difference?” “It is a difference I hadn’t thought of; I admit that. Still—_calling_ one’s self a lady doesn’t—er—” “I wouldn’t go on if I were you.” Howard Tracy turned his head to see who it might be that had introduced this remark. It was a short man about forty years old, with sandy hair, no beard, and a pleasant face badly freckled but alive and intelligent, and he wore slop-shop clothing which was neat but showed wear. He had come from the front room beyond the hall, where he had left his hat, and he had a chipped and cracked white wash-bowl in his hand. The girl came and took the bowl. “I’ll get it for you. You go right ahead and _give_ it to him, Mr. Barrow. He’s the new boarder—Mr. Tracy—and I’d just got to where it was getting too deep for me.”