‘Don’t you think you had better begin by reforming yourself?’
‘Really, sir,’ answered Lancelot, ‘I am too old for that worn-out quibble. The root of all my sins has been selfishness and sloth. Am I to cure them by becoming still more selfish and slothful? What part of myself can I reform except my actions? and the very sin of my actions has been, as I take it, that I’ve been doing nothing to reform others; never fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as your Prayer-book has it.’
‘My Prayer-book?’ answered the stranger, with a quaint smile.
‘Upon my word, Lancelot,’ interposed the banker, with a frightened look, ‘you must not get into an argument: you must be more respectful: you don’t know to whom you are speaking.’
‘And I don’t much care,’ answered he. ‘Life is really too grim earnest in these days to stand on ceremony. I am sick of blind leaders of the blind, of respectable preachers to the respectable, who drawl out second-hand trivialities, which they neither practise nor wish to see practised. I’ve had enough all my life of Scribes and Pharisees in white cravats, laying on man heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and then not touching them themselves with one of their fingers.’
‘Silence, sir!’ roared the banker, while the stranger threw himself into a chair, and burst into a storm of laughter.
‘Upon my word, friend Mammon, here’s another of Hans Andersen’s ugly ducks!’
‘I really do not mean to be rude,’ said Lancelot, recollecting himself, ‘but I am nearly desperate. If your heart is in the right place, you will understand me! if not, the less we talk to each other the better.’
‘Most true,’ answered the stranger; ‘and I do understand you; and if, as I hope, we see more of each other henceforth, we will see if we cannot solve one or two of these problems between us.’
At this moment Lancelot was summoned downstairs, and found, to his great pleasure, Tregarva waiting for him. That worthy personage bowed to Lancelot reverently and distantly.