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"That's just it," exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. "What do I want? I look all about me and I can't see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon.
Is that Fancy Tabb?" interrupted Cai. He had happened to glance over his shoulder and spied her from the ladder. "Well, and what d'ee think of it?" he asked, as one sure of the answer. "I was sayin' as I'd like to be a Queen," said Fancy. "Queen of England, I mean: none of your second-bests."
I think second-bests are much more comfy than first-bests. You feel equivalent to meeting any one, and have "a heart for any fate," as it says in the poetry-book, and yet you are not starched and booted and stiffened and tightened out of all human feelings. Lynwood Castle is in a hollow in the hills. It has a moat all round it with water-lily leaves on it.
"I could, if I had somebody to work for, as David has." "You'd better get somebody," she said gaily. "I don't want any second-bests," he declared. "Donkey!" Elizabeth said good-naturedly. But she was a little surprised, for whatever else Blair was, he was not stupid and such talk is always stupid. That it had its root in anything deeper than chaffing never occurred to her.
Therefore, since that now dim day when the Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good Americans have chosen England and the English to symbolize whatever irked them in their own tradition. It is from England and the English that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not a shadow imitators, second-bests, Colonials.
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