There’s a beginning at once. Why don’t you rather, with your practical power, turn sanitary reformer—the only true soldier—and conquer those real devils and “natural enemies” of Englishmen, carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen?’
‘Ce n’est pas mon métier, my dear fellow. I am miserably behind the age. People are getting so cursedly in earnest now-a-days, that I shall have to bolt to the backwoods to amuse myself in peace; or else sham dumb as the monkeys do, lest folks should find out that I’m rational, and set me to work.’
Lancelot laughed and sighed.
‘But how on earth do you contrive to get on so well with men with whom you have not an idea in common!’
‘Savoir faire, O infant Hercules! own daddy to savoir vivre. I am a good listener; and, therefore, the most perfect, because the most silent, of flatterers. When they talk Puginesquery, I stick my head on one side attentively, and “think the more,” like the lady’s parrot. I have been all the morning looking over a set of drawings for my lord’s new chapel; and every soul in the party fancies me a great antiquary, just because I have been retailing to B as my own everything that A told me the moment before.’
‘I envy you your tact, at all events.’
‘Why the deuce should you? You may rise in time to something better than tact; to what the good book, I suppose, means by “wisdom.” Young geniuses like you, who have been green enough to sell your souls to “truth,” must not meddle with tact, unless you wish to fare as the donkey did when he tried to play lap-dog.’
‘At all events, I would sooner remain cub till they run me down and eat me, than give up speaking my mind,’ said Lancelot. ‘Fool I may be, but the devil himself shan’t make me knave.’
‘Quite proper. On two thousand a year a man can afford to be honest. Kick out lustily right and left!—After all, the world is like a spaniel; the more you beat it, the better it likes you—if you have money. Only don’t kick too hard; for, after all, it has a hundred million pair of shins to your one.’
‘Don’t fear that I shall run a-muck against society just now. I am too thoroughly out of my own good books. I have been for years laughing at Young England, and yet its little finger is thicker than my whole body, for it is trying to do something; and I, alas, am doing utterly nothing. I should be really glad to take a lesson of these men and their plans for social improvement.’