"I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you had
power to bestow them," I answered.

"Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
creatures. Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them. Vanity would
accomplish that much. Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not
radical virtue--since we are beginning to be bookish again."

"To what do you reduce honour and right?" returned I.

"As I said to you on a memorable occasion," she answered very drily, "to
a code."

"That is," rejoined I, "a man does a good action, lives an honourable
life, to satisfy a social canon--to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who
believes in him, and loves him?"

"Yes." She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father. She
drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
not tell.

"But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?" I urged. "That
he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be
fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?"

"Yes, it is true either way--pleasure or misery. Please come to the
saloon and get me an ice before the next dance."