“I despise popularity.”
“You despise bread and butter. I believe you lose twenty pound a month by your Age to Come?”
“To speak more correctly,” replies Bertram, bitterly, “it gets me into debt to that amount!”
“Heaven and earth! Why don’t you drop it?”
“It is a matter of principle.”
“Principle which will land you in Queer Street. Now, my dear Wilfrid, no man thinks more things bosh than I do, or takes more pleasure in saying so, but I combine pleasure with business; I say my say in such a way that it brings me in eighty per cent.”
Bertram looks at him derisively.
“I have always known that your intellect was only equalled by your venality!”
Fanshawe laughs good-humouredly.
“That is neat. That is soothing. It is not difficult to understand that you are not considered a clubbable man! However, as you credit me with intellect, I don’t mind your denying me morality. But seriously, my dear friend, you are much too violent, too uncompromising for success in journalism. Who tries to prove too much fails to prove anything, and when you bend your bow too violently it snaps and speeds no arrow. I confess that I (who am as revolutionary as most people and always disposed to agree with you) do frequently get up from the perusal of one of your articles with the unwilling conviction that it is best to let the old order of things alone. Now, that is certainly not the condition of mind which you wish to produce in your readers.”