“I think you do not understand,” she said in a low, grave voice. “I utterly disapprove, I utterly abhor, the course which my father takes. I think his objects contemptible and his means to attain them loathsome. If you only knew what they look to persons of breeding and honor! Society laughs at him whilst it uses him and rules him. He is not a gentleman. He never will be one. A complacent premier may get him a knightage, a baronetage, a peerage; and a sovereign as complacent may let him kiss her hand. But nothing of that will make him a gentleman. He will never be one if he lived to be a hundred or if he live to entertain emperors. I cannot alter his actions. I cannot open his eyes. I have perhaps no right to speak thus of him. But I cannot help it. I despise the whole miserable ignominious farce. I cannot bear to be forced to remain a spectator of it. This place is Lord Roxhall’s. All the money in the world cannot make it ours. We are aliens and intruders. All the people whom Lady Kenilworth will bring here next week will go away to ridicule us, plebeians as we are masquerading in fine clothes and ancient houses.” “My dear! my dear!” cried her mother in great trepidation. “You make me all in a cold tremble to hear you. All you say is gospel truth, and I’ve felt it many a time, or like to it, myself. But it is no manner of use to say it. Your father thinks he’s a great man, and nobody’ll put him out of conceit of himself; it’s true that as he made his pile he’s the right to the spending of it. Don’t you talk of going away, Kathleen. You are the only creature I have to look to, for I know full well that I’m only a stone in your father’s path and a thorn in his flesh. I can’t kill myself to pleasure him, for ’twould be fire everlasting, but I know I’m no use to him now. I was of use on the other side, and he knew it then, though I can’t call to mind one grateful word as ever he said to me; but he knew it, and wouldn’t have got along as fast as he did without me; and nobody kept ledgers better than me, nor scrubbed a kitchen table whiter. That’s neither here nor there now, however; and I’m in his way now with fine folks; and look like ’em I never shall. But you, my dear, you do look like ’em, and talk like ’em, and carry yourself like ’em. I would call you like an empress, only I saw an empress once, and she was a little old hodmedod of a woman in a Shetland shawl, and she was cheapening shells on the beach at Blankenberge; and you are grand and stately, and fine as a lily on its stalk. I want them to see what you look like, my dear; and they won’t laugh at _you_, that’s certain. As for the house, it’s been paid for, so I don’t see how you can say it’s Lord Roxhall’s still. He can’t eat his cake and have it.