"Who told you that?" he retorted. "I don't think the girl herself
would have said so. It's not every girl that would care to marry a
king's son. She might have had a lover of her own down in the sea. At
all events the prince was none the better for it."
"But the song says she made a tender wife," I objected.
"She couldn't help herself. She made the best of it. I dare say he
wasn't a bad sort of a fellow, but he was no gentleman."
"Turkey!" I exclaimed. "He was a prince!"
"I know that."
"Then he must have been a gentleman."
"I don't know that. I've read of a good many princes who did things I
should be ashamed to do."
"But you're not a prince, Turkey," I returned, in the low endeavour to
bolster up the wrong with my silly logic.
"No. Therefore if I were to do what was rude and dishonest, people
would say: 'What could you expect of a ploughboy?' A prince ought to
be just so much better bred than a ploughboy. I would scorn to do what
that prince did. What's wrong in a ploughboy can't be right in a
prince, Ranald. Or else right is only right sometimes; so that right
may be wrong and wrong may be right, which is as much as to say there
is no right and wrong; and if there's no right and wrong, the world's
an awful mess, and there can't be any God, for a God would never have
made it like that."
"Well, Turkey, you know best.
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