“Naturally; but you have no right to think only of what you want,” I said, “you are wanted yourself.”
“Yes, by the police!”
“Don’t scoff just now, old boy. Your services are wanted. I know you have capacities that have never been used, never touched. The plain fact of the matter is that up to now you have lived and acted as a boy—amusing yourself. I don’t want to rub it in, but now you have got to make up for it by giving a man’s work to the world while you can.”
“How can I? What can I do? I can do nothing but sail a ship. Ten thousand old duffers can do that better.”
“There is just one thing you can do that everyone cannot do. You can command.”
All men like to be told they are capable of command, and Edmund did not question my statement.
“Much chance I have now of commanding anything or anybody,” was all he said.
“Remember you come of the officer class,” I said. “We have ceased to be a ruling class. I know it’s old-fashioned even to think we are a class. The vulgar call it ‘snobbish.’ But heredity remains a law of Nature, and democracy is only an invention of man.”
“I don’t see that social theories are going to help us much just now.”
“Then I’ll come down to hard facts. However wrong and corrupt it may be, we are still to some extent a privileged class. And owing to that fact you can still get a fresh start, which, to be perfectly frank, a plebeian could not get.”