"Oh come, Uncle John, don't talk as if we were Aztecs, or an effete monarchy." "We _are_ effete, and we deserve to die out root and branch." The little movement over in the dark corner passed unnoticed in Ethan's attempt at protest. "Or perhaps you think," said John Gano, "because we are not of noble descent, that being an old or rather a long dominant and idle race, doesn't count." He smiled with a tinge of superior pity. "How do you know we're so old a family?" demanded his nephew. "I feel it in my bones; they ache--_they ache_." He had begun the sentence with a hoarse laugh, and at the end his haggard face settled into lines of pain. "But whether we're an old family in the paltry social sense is beside the mark. Nature doesn't care a continental copper," he went on fiercely, "whether you're a king or a bankrupt cotton-planter, or any other cumberer of the earth. What people don't realize is that a peasant or a rag-picker may come of an idle, worn-out stock, and if so, be sure Nature has marked him down. If purple and fine linen don't deceive her, neither do rags. No sickly sentimentality about _her_. She'll find her enemy, the unfit, through any and all disguise. As for your aristocrat, she won't distinguish him even by her revenge. She has nothing to do with that figment of the pompous mind, 'belonging to an old family.' Families are _all_ old. The question is: How closely are you related to--well, to use the ready-made phrase: How near are you to the soil?--to the fountain-head of blood made sweet by denial and swift by strenuous living? Ah, my boy, our fathers sat too long at their ease in houses that the building and the tending of made muscle and brawn for others. We lounged in arm-chairs by our fires of fat Southern pine, but the men who got the vital warmth were the men who hewed the tall trees down. We've blinded our eyes over books, and blunted our humanity in a petty concern about our souls, while our bodies were going to destruction." There was dead silence for a few minutes. "And those more fortunate ones," his nephew said, in a dull, resentful voice, "who are they? How is it possible to be _sure_? How shall your elect be known?" "As of old, by their fruits. They and their children have broad shoulders; they haven't chests like ours--they haven't hands like mine." He held his up, and both men (the girl, too, in the far corner) saw the fire glow red behind the thin, transparent fingers. He dropped them with an air of one who throws up a desperate game. Val pushed aside the rug that still partly covered her, and slid to the ground, arrested on the sofa's edge by Ethan's saying more angrily than she had thought that voice could sound: "I tell you straight, Uncle John, I don't accept this paralyzing doctrine of yours, still less do I think your children will. I tell you frankly I rebel against--" John Gano's wax-white hand caught him by the shoulder in a grip that made the young man wince.