“I do,” said Benham.
“Do what?”
“Funk.”
“Benham, I believe that naturally you funk as much as I do. You're more a thing of nerves than I am, far more. But you keep yourself up to the mark, and I have let myself get flabby. You're so right. You're so utterly right. These last nights I've confessed it—aloud. I had an inkling of it—after that rag. But now it's as clear as daylight. I don't know if you mean to go on with me, after what's happened, but anyhow I want you to know, whether you end our friendship or not—”
“Billy, don't be an old ass,” said Benham.
Both young men paused for a moment. They made no demonstrations. But the strain was at an end between them.
“I've thought it all out,” Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy. “We two are both of the same kind of men. Only you see, Benham, you have a natural pride and I haven't. You have pride. But we are both intellectuals. We both belong to what the Russians call the Intelligentsia. We have ideas, we have imagination, that is our strength. And that is our weakness. That makes us moral light-weights. We are flimsy and uncertain people. All intellectuals are flimsy and uncertain people. It's not only that they are critical and fastidious; they are weak-handed. They look about them; their attention wanders. Unless they have got a habit of controlling themselves and forcing themselves and holding themselves together.”
“The habit of pride.”
“Yes. And then—then we are lords of the world.”
“All this, Billy,” said Benham, “I steadfastly believe.”