“I can do without it, too.”

“Whereas,” she persisted, “if I were to let you do this I should be robbing you of the essence of what you are.”

He drew back slightly.  “You mean that your Yankee is a strong man, while I’m—­”

“I don’t mean anything invidious or unkind.  But isn’t it self-evident, or nearly, that we’re individuals, while you’re parts of an intricate social system?  The minute you fall out of your place in the system you come to grief; but vicissitudes don’t affect us much more than a change of coats.”

“I don’t care a button for my place in the system.”

“But I do.  I care for it for you.  I should have married you and shared it if I could.  But I’d rather not marry you than that you should lose it.”

“That is,” he said, coldly, “you’d rather use his money than—­”

She withdrew her hands, her brows contracting and her eyes clouding in her effort to make him understand the position from her point of view.  “You see, it’s this way.  For one thing, we’ve taken the money already.  That’s past.  We may have taken it temporarily, or for good and all, as things turn out; but in any case it’s done.  And yet even if it weren’t done it would be easier for us to draw on him rather than on you, because he’s one of ourselves.”

“One of yourselves?  I thought that’s just what he wasn’t.  I thought he was a jolly outsider.”

“You mean socially.  But that again hasn’t much significance in a country where socially we’re all of one class.  Where there’s only one class there can’t be any outsiders.”

“Oh, that’s all very fine.  But look at you with your extremes of rich and poor!”

“That’s the most superficial difference among us.  It’s the easiest possible thing to transcend.  I’m transcending it now in feeling that I’ve a right—­yes, a kind of right—­to take Peter Davenant’s money, because as Americans we’ve a claim on each other.”

He threw himself against the straight back of the chair, his arms flung out with a gesture that brought his hands nearly to the floor.  “You’re the last people in the world to feel anything of the kind.  Every one knows that you’re a set of ruthless, predatory—­”

“I know that’s the way it seems; and I’m not defending anything that may be wrong.  And yet, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we have a sense of brotherhood—­I don’t know any other name for it—­among ourselves which isn’t to be found anywhere else in the world.  You English haven’t got it.  That’s why the thing I’m saying seems mere sentiment to you, and even mawkish.  You’re so afraid of sentiment.  But it’s true.  It may be only a rudimentary sense of brotherhood; and it’s certainly not universal, as it ought to be, because we feel it only among ourselves.  We don’t really include the foreigner—­not at least till he becomes one of us.  I’m an instance of that limitation myself, because I can’t feel it toward you, and I do—­”