“It ’s all very well of you to talk that way,” she rejoined.  “But suppose you should marry me, and when you become famous and rich, and patients flock to your office, and fashionable people to your home, and every one wants to know who you are and whence you came, you ’ll be obliged to bring out the governor, and the judge, and the rest of them.  If you should refrain, in order to forestall embarrassing inquiries about my ancestry, I should have deprived you of something you are entitled to, something which has a real social value.  And when people found out all about you, as they eventually would from some source, they would want to know—­we Americans are a curious people—­who your wife was, and you could only say”——­

“The best and sweetest woman on earth, whom I love unspeakably.”

“You know that is not what I mean.  You could only say—­a Miss Nobody, from Nowhere.”

“A Miss Hohlfelder, from Cincinnati, the only child of worthy German parents, who fled from their own country in ’49 to escape political persecution—­an ancestry that one surely need not be ashamed of.”

“No; but the consciousness that it was not true would be always with me, poisoning my mind, and darkening my life and yours.”

“Your views of life are entirely too tragic, Clara,” the young man argued soothingly.  “We are all worms of the dust, and if we go back far enough, each of us has had millions of ancestors; peasants and serfs, most of them; thieves, murderers, and vagabonds, many of them, no doubt; and therefore the best of us have but little to boast of.  Yet we are all made after God’s own image, and formed by his hand, for his ends; and therefore not to be lightly despised, even the humblest of us, least of all by ourselves.  For the past we can claim no credit, for those who made it died with it.  Our destiny lies in the future.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I know all that.  But I am not like you.  A woman is not like a man; she cannot lose herself in theories and generalizations.  And there are tests that even all your philosophy could not endure.  Suppose you should marry me, and then some time, by the merest accident, you should learn that my origin was the worst it could be—­that I not only had no name, but was not entitled to one.”

“I cannot believe it,” he said, “and from what we do know of your history it is hardly possible.  If I learned it, I should forget it, unless, perchance, it should enhance your value in my eyes, by stamping you as a rare work of nature, an exception to the law of heredity, a triumph of pure beauty and goodness over the grosser limitations of matter.  I cannot imagine, now that I know you, anything that could make me love you less.  I would marry you just the same—­even if you were one of your dancing-class to-night.”

“I must go back to them,” said Clara, as the music ceased.

“My answer,” he urged, “give me my answer!”

“Not to-night, John,” she pleaded.  “Grant me a little longer time to make up my mind—­for your sake.”