“Well, the result, even in rural England, is not always so bad,” said Aldous Raeburn, smiling a little, but more coldly.  Marcella, glancing at him, understood in a moment that she had roused a certain family and class pride in him—­a pride which was not going to assert itself, but none the less implied the sudden opening of a gulf between herself and him.  In an instant her quick imagination realised herself as the daughter and niece of two discredited members of a great class.  When she attacked the class, or the system, the man beside her—­any man in similar circumstances—­must naturally think:  “Ah, well, poor girl—­Dick Boyce’s daughter—­what can you expect?” Whereas—­Aldous Raeburn!—­she thought of the dignity of the Maxwell name, of the width of the Maxwell possessions, balanced only by the high reputation of the family for honourable, just and Christian living, whether as amongst themselves or towards their neighbours and dependents.  A shiver of passionate vanity, wrath, and longing passed through her as her tall frame stiffened.

“There are model squires, of course,” she said slowly, striving at least for a personal dignity which should match his.  “There are plenty of landowners who do their duty as they understand it—­no one denies that.  But that does not affect the system; the grandson of the best man may be the worst, but his one-man power remains the same.  No! the time has come for a wider basis.  Paternal government and charity were very well in their way—­democratic self-government will manage to do without them!”

She flung him a gay, quivering, defiant look.  It delighted her to pit these wide and threatening generalisations against the Maxwell power—­to show the heir of it that she at least—­father or no father—­was no hereditary subject of his, and bound to no blind admiration of the Maxwell methods and position.

Aldous Raeburn took her onslaught very calmly, smiling frankly back at her indeed all the time.  Miss Boyce’s opinions could hardly matter to him intellectually, whatever charm and stimulus he might find in her talk.  This subject of the duties, rights, and prospects of his class went, as it happened, very deep with him—­too deep for chance discussion.  What she said, if he ever stopped to think of it in itself, seemed to him a compound of elements derived partly from her personal history, partly from the random opinions that young people of a generous type pick up from newspapers and magazines.  She had touched his family pride for an instant; but only for an instant.  What he was abidingly conscious of, was of a beautiful wild creature struggling with difficulties in which he was somehow himself concerned, and out of which, in some way or other, he was becoming more and more determined—­absurdly determined—­to help her.

“Oh! no doubt the world will do very well without us some day,” he said lightly, in answer to her tirade; “no one is indispensable.  But are you so sure, Miss Boyce, you believe in your own creed?  I thought I had observed—­pardon me for saying it—­on the two or three occasions we have met, some degenerate signs of individualism?  You take pleasure in the old place, you say; you were delighted to come and live where your ancestors lived before you; you are full of desires to pull these poor people out of the mire in your own way.  No!  I don’t feel that you are thorough-going!”