“Much obliged if you will, Hattie. I was coming to borrow of the boys.” He sat down at his ease on an old trunk, and said, “I’ve been listening and got interested; and as I was saying, I wouldn’t go on, if I were you. You see where you are coming to, don’t you? _Calling_ yourself a lady doesn’t elect you; that is what you were going to say; and you saw that if you said it you were going to run right up against another difference that you hadn’t thought of: to-wit, Whose _right_ is it to do the electing? Over there, twenty thousand people in a million elect themselves gentlemen and ladies, and the nine hundred and eighty thousand _accept_ that decree and swallow the affront which it puts upon them. Why, if they didn’t accept it, it wouldn’t _be_ an election, it would be a dead letter and have no force at all. Over here the twenty thousand would-be exclusives come up to the polls and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen. But the thing doesn’t stop there. The nine hundred and eighty thousand come and vote themselves to be ladies and gentlemen _too_, and that elects the whole nation. Since the whole million vote themselves ladies and gentlemen, there is no question about that election. It _does_ make absolute equality, and there is no fiction about it; while over yonder the _inequality_, (by decree of the infinitely feeble, and consent of the infinitely strong,) is also absolute—as real and absolute as our equality.” Tracy had shrunk promptly into his English shell when this speech began, notwithstanding he had now been in severe training several weeks for contact and intercourse with the common herd on the common herd’s terms; but he lost no time in pulling himself out again, and so by the time the speech was finished his valves were open once more, and he was forcing himself to accept without resentment the common herd’s frank fashion of dropping sociably into other people’s conversations unembarrassed and uninvited. The process was not very difficult this time, for the man’s smile and voice and manner were persuasive and winning. Tracy would even have liked him on the spot, but for the fact—fact which he was not really aware of—that the equality of men was not yet a reality to him, it was only a theory; the _mind_ perceived, but the _man_ failed to feel it. It was Hattie’s ghost over again, merely turned around. Theoretically Barrow was his equal, but it was distinctly distasteful to see him exhibit it. He presently said: