Page:Vivian Grey, Volume 1.djvu/240

 "Oh! then you've been joking all this time!"

"Oh! no; not at all. Come then, let us imagine this perfect lot. In the first place, I would be born in the middling classes of society, or even lower, because I would wish my character to be impartially developed. I would be born to no hereditary prejudices, nor hereditary passions. My course in life should not be carved out by the example of a grandfather, nor my ideas modelled to a preconceived system of family perfection. Do you like my first principle, Mrs. Million?"

"I must hear every thing before I give an opinion."

"When, therefore, my mind was formed, I would wish to become the proprietor of a princely fortune."

"Yes!" eagerly exclaimed Mrs. Million.

"And now would come the moral singularity of my fate. If I had gained this fortune by