“This idea of Hoffendahl’s? You must remember that as yet we know only very vaguely what it is. It is difficult, therefore, to measure closely the importance it may have, and I don’t think I have ever, in talking with you, pretended to fix that importance. I don’t suppose it will matter immensely whether your own engagement is carried out or not; but if it is it will have been a detail in a scheme of which the general effect will be decidedly useful. I believe, and you pretend to believe, though I am not sure you do, in the advent of the democracy. It will help the democracy to get possession that the classes that keep them down shall be admonished from time to time that they have a very definite and very determined intention of doing so. An immense deal will depend upon that. Hoffendahl is a capital admonisher.”
Hyacinth listened to this explanation with an expression of interest that was not feigned; and after a moment he rejoined, “When you say you believe in the democracy, I take for granted you mean you positively wish for their coming into power, as I have always supposed. Now what I really have never understood is this—why you should desire to put forward a lot of people whom you regard, almost without exception, as donkeys.”
“Ah, my dear lad,” laughed Muniment, “when one undertakes to meddle in human affairs one must deal with human material. The upper classes have the longest ears.”
“I have heard you say that you were working for an equality in human conditions, to abolish the immemorial inequality. What you want, then, for all mankind is a similar nuance of asininity.”
“That’s very clever; did you pick it up in France? The low tone of our fellow-mortals is a result of bad conditions; it is the conditions I want to alter. When those that have no start to speak of have a good one, it is but fair to infer that they will go further. I want to try them, you know.”
“But why equality?” Hyacinth asked. “Somehow, that word doesn’t say so much to me as it used to. Inequality—inequality! I don’t know whether it’s by dint of repeating it over to myself, but that doesn’t shock me as it used.”
“They didn’t put you up to that in France, I’m sure!” Muniment exclaimed. “Your point of view has changed; you have risen in the world.”
“Risen? Good God, what have I risen to?”
“True enough; you were always a bloated little swell!” And Muniment gave his young friend a sociable slap on the back. There was a momentary bitterness in its being imputed to such a one as Hyacinth, even in joke, that he had taken sides with the fortunate ones of the earth, and he had it on his tongue’s end to ask his friend if he had never guessed what his proud titles were—the bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter, out of which he had been picked by a sewing-girl. But his life-long reserve on this point was a habit not easily broken, and before such an inquiry could flash through it Muniment had gone on: “If you’ve ceased to believe we can do anything, it will be rather awkward, you know.”
“I don’t know what I believe, God help me!” Hyacinth remarked, in a tone of an effect so lugubrious that Paul gave one of his longest, most boyish-sounding laughs. And he added, “I don’t want you to think I have ceased to care for the people. What am I but one of the poorest and meanest of them?”