Explore "The Great Skene Mystery" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Near all that night I sat out in my den, wakeful and deeply meditative. Was I glad or sorry to have wormed out thus much of the truth? And of what potential profit to me was my new knowledge? As to the former, _noblesse oblige_: better be an unchristened vagabond than the legitimate hope of Mr Snooks, roturier. Nameless, I could make a name of my own; not be condemned all my days to the task of redeeming a vulgar one bequeathed me. Therein was signified, I thought, the true moral of all nomenclature.
Why, for instance, should the son of Mr Rottengoose be handicapped from his birth with that imposed label and libel; be forced to carry throughout his blameless life that unasked and unmerited stigma of an ancestor's villainous sobriquet; have to steel himself to the torture of the titter pursuing him over the edge of the dancing-card on which he had just impressed his awful identity; be obliged, perhaps, to advertise his ignominy on a brass plate, to stultify his fondest ideals, his most romantic passions, over the sign-manual of a decayed fowl -- a name bestowed, probably, in the first instance on a village idiot; finally, be called upon to cheapen the nobility of his Last Will and Testament in the terms that "I, Robert Rottengoose, being of sound mind and in full hope of the resurrection, etc. "?