‘They’ll do nothing of the kind! It’s just as likely that they wrote the whole correspondence at the same table and with the same jug of punch between them.’
‘If so, I don’t envy you your career or your comrades.’
‘It’s a lottery with big prizes in the wheel all the same! I could tell you the names of great swells, Master Dick, who have made very proud places for themselves in England by what you call “journalism.” In France it is the one road to eminence. Cannot you imagine, besides, what capital fun it is to be able to talk to scores of people you were never introduced to? to tell them an infinity of things on public matters, or now and then about themselves; and in so many moods as you have tempers, to warn them, scold, compassionate, correct, console, or abuse them? to tell them not to be over-confident or bumptious, or purse-proud—’
‘And who are you, may I ask, who presume to do all this?’
‘That’s as it may be. We are occasionally Guizot, Thiers, Prévot Paradol, Lytton, Disraeli, or Joe Atlee.’
‘Modest, at all events.’
‘And why not say what I feel—not what I have done, but what is in me to do? Can’t you understand this: it would never occur to me that I could vault over a five-bar gate if I had been born a cripple? but the conscious possession of a little pliant muscularity might well tempt me to try it.’
‘And get a cropper for your pains.’
‘Be it so. Better the cropper than pass one’s life looking over the top rail and envying the fellow that had cleared it; but what’s this? here’s a letter here: it got in amongst the newspapers. I say, Dick, do you stand this sort of thing?’ said he, as he read the address.
‘Stand what sort of thing?’ asked the other, half angrily.