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" Lord Randall barreled inside, brandishing his cane in Drew's face." You beggarly knave, I was told this marriage was in name only! Who gave you permission to consummate the vows?" " Theodore Hopkin, governor of this colony, representative of the kind, and it's going to cost you plenty, for that daughter of yours is nothing but trouble. What in the blazes were you thinking to allow her an education?" Drew bit back his smile at the man's shocked expression. Nothing like landing the first punch.Lord Randall furrowed his bushy gray brows." I knew not about her education until it was too late." Drew straightened the cuffs of his shirt. " Well, be prepared to pay dearly for it. No man should have to suffer through what I do with the constant spouting of the most addlepated word puzzles you could imagine." -----------------------------------------" I require fifteen thousand pounds." Lord Randall spewed ale across the floor. " What! Surely drink has tickled your poor brain. You're a FARMER, you impudent rascal. I'll give you five thousand." Drew plopped his drink onto the table at his side, its contents sloshing over the rim. A satisfied smile broke across his face." Excellent." He stood." When will you take her back to England with you? Today? Tomorrow?" The old man's red-rimmed eyes widened. " I cannot take her back. Why, she's already birthed a child!" Drew shrugged. " Fifteen thousand or I send her AND the babe back, with or without you. "
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" It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions...
The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor. "
― Mark Twain