employ to individuals of a lower caste who were equally uninteresting?"

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Million.

"The height of the ambition of the less exalted ranks is to be noble,
because they conceive to be noble implies to be superior; associating in
their minds, as they always do, a pre-eminence over then equals. But to
be noble among nobles, where is the preeminence?"

"Where indeed?" said Mrs. Million; and she thought of herself, sitting
the most considered personage in this grand castle, and yet with
sufficiently base blood flowing in her veins.

"And thus, in the highest circles," continued Vivian, "a man is of
course not valued because he is a Marquess or a Duke; but because he is
a great warrior, or a great statesman, or very fashionable, or very
witty. In all classes but the highest, a peer, however unbefriended by
nature or by fortune, becomes a man of a certain rate of consequence;
but to be a person of consequence in the highest class requires
something else besides high blood."

"I quite agree with you in your sentiments, Mr. Grey. Now what
character or what situation in life would you choose, if you had the
power of making your choice?"

"That is really a most metaphysical question. As is the custom of all
young men, I have sometimes, in my reveries, imagined what I conceived
to be a lot of pure happiness: and yet Mrs. Million will perhaps be
astonished that I was neither to be nobly born nor to acquire nobility,
that I was not to be a statesman, or a poet, or a warrior, or a