"Westlake, I would do all but the impossible to show my sense of your kindness. For the rest, my appreciation of little Miss Fanny's inventive powers could not be heightened."
"Does that mean no? Borrow, I shall think in earnest that you have done me a wrong in giving so much time away from me, if these are really your last days in our parts."
"We will make it up to you. I will tell you how we will make it up to you. Come to us,--come to Massachusetts: I will give you there a week of my time for every day we have taken from you here. Come to us in June: that is the month in which New England is most itself. Come and renew old associations."
"You will never see me again, if you wait to see me there."
"I am not so sure that I used to like it, when I think back upon it. At any rate, if you want to see _me_, you must see me in my own place. I am not myself anywhere else. Equality, Borrow, equality is a very good thing for people who have never known anything better: may be a very good thing for people who can work themselves up out of it. But for a man who has grown up in the enjoyment of those privileges inappreciable by the vulgar, but which by the noble of every age have been regarded as the most real and the most valuable,--for such a man to sit, one at a long table, feeling himself nobody, and knowing all the time he has a right to be somebody! You can talk very easily about equality. You have never suffered from it. You have your learning and---- Well, you know how to talk. I have no learning, and I can't talk, except to particular friends. A man cannot ticket himself with his claims to estimation. Even Paris has too much equality for me. Flora liked it; she had her beauty and her toilet. But I! how I longed to be back here among my own simple, humble people! As soon as she was married, I made off home. In my own place, among my own people, I am, I might almost say, like a god, if I were not afraid of shocking you. And is not their fate in my hands? My frown is their night, my smile is their sunshine. The very ratification of their prayers to a Higher Power is intrusted to my discretion. Homage, Borrow, homage is the sweetest draught ever brought to mortal lips!"
"The homage of equals I suppose may be," said Dr. Borrow, modestly.