'It is a privilege of which the wise do not avail themselves. I was only going to say that I think you would become heroic, were you in heroic circumstances. But the world is always with you and its influences are narcotic or alcoholic, heroic never.'

'I hope I should go to the scaffold decently, if you mean that, were I sent there. That always seems to me a very easy thing to do. But to be amiable or philosophic if one had no waiting-woman, or no bath, or no change of clothes, seems to me much more difficult.'

'Yet, even then, if you were tried——'

'Pray do not, in your anxiety to test my character, go and ruin my fortune! Poverty is tolerable in a novel; but in real life it can only be sordid, tiresome, and vulgar.'

'Not necessarily vulgar. I assure you if I could have brought the House of Othmar down as Samson did the temple of Dagon, without slaying the Philistines under it, as he did, I should have done it many years ago. If poverty be vulgar, what are riches? Intolerably vulgar in my estimation.'

She looked at him with a certain admiration crossed by a certain disdain.

'I always thought your contempt for wealth very picturesque,' she replied, 'and it is, I know, quite sincere. At the same time it is a quixotism, and gets you laughed at by those who cannot possibly understand all the refinements of your motives as I do; to Bleichroeder or Soubeyran you would seem insane. And I do not think you do at all understand one sign of your times; which is the immense preponderance given by it to mere wealth. Every year adds to the power of the financiers. Already it is they who, in reality, make peace or war: ministers cannot move without them, and without them armies starve. At present their dominion is greatly hidden, and not understood by the people; but in a little while it is they who will be the open dictators of the world. It will not be precisely a millennium, but, were I you, I should see the picturesque and the ambitious side of it.'

'I can only see the absolute corruption and decadence which will be inevitable.'

'Because nature meant you to be a poet, writing sonnets to a grasshopper like Meleager, or dying early in the arms of the sea like Shelley; you have been always out of tune with your own times. It is a kind of anæmia, for which there is no cure.'

'It is a malady you share——'