"Did you notice the Sandys's English butler?" asked Adelaide.

"_Did_ I? I'll bet he keeps every one in the Sandys family up to
the mark."

"That's it," continued Adelaide. "He's a poor creature, dumb and
ignorant. He knows only one thing--snobbishness. Yet every one of us was
in terror of his opinion. No doubt kings feel the same way about the
people around them. Always what's expected of us--and by whom? Why, by
people who have little sense and less knowledge. They run the world,
don't they?"

"As Dory Hargrave says," said her brother, "the only scheme for making
things better that's worth talking about is raising the standards of the
masses because their standards are ours. We'll be fools and unjust as
long as they'll let us. And they'll let us as long as they're ignorant."

By inheritance Arthur and Adelaide had excellent minds, shrewd and with
that cast of humor which makes for justice of judgment by mocking at the
solemn frauds of interest and prejudice. But, as is often the case with
the children of the rich and the well-to-do, there had been no necessity
for either to use intellect; their parents and hirelings of various
degrees, paid with their father's generously given money, had done their
thinking for them. The whole of animate creation is as lazy as it dares
be, and man is no exception. Thus, the Ranger children, like all other
normal children of luxury, rarely made what would have been, for their
fallow minds, the arduous exertion of real thinking. When their minds
were not on pastimes or personalities they were either rattling round in
their heads or exchanging the ideas, real and reputed, that happened to