Chapter 15

After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study,
where he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat
surprised, as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most
attracted towards a department of the library filled with books of
English antiquities, and genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter,
indeed, having the preference over the others.

"This is very remarkable," said he, smiling. "By what right or reason,
by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all
advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking
to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this
fantastic science of heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people
just made, how can you care for them?"

"My dear sir," said Redclyffe, "I doubt whether the most devoted
antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between
it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder
to preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is
therefore the more precious when we have it really to boast of."

"True," said the Warden, "when a race keeps itself distinguished among
the grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to
place and eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force
and efficacy in the blood. I doubt not," he said, looking with the free
approval of an elder man at the young man's finely developed face and
graceful form,--"I doubt not that you can look back upon a line of
ancestry, always shining out from the surrounding obscurity of the
mob."

Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and
his advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as
if he were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty,
meanness, petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more
keenly than ever before what was his misfortune.

"I must not let you lie under this impression," said he manfully to the
Warden. "I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost
in impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind
friend--on whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever--my
life would probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened."

"Well, well," said the kind