"Funny, Rowland! What a ghastly notion of fun you must have to call the loss of the two most valuable lives in the yacht funny!"
"Valuable! In what way were these lives valuable? They were not valuable even to the men themselves. One was a hopeless invalid and the other was as morose as Boreas. One of them did, it is true, occasionally vote in the House of Lords, but only to oppose all useful measures of reform. The other had not become even one of that most useless body of men in England, members of the House of Commons."
"Rowland! Rowland! this will never do!"
"Who wants it to do? Not I, any way. I don't want myself to do. Wanting to do is one of the common and mean aspirations. It is the father of hypocrisy, and servility, and lies, and all the degrading vices of the time-server; it is the foul pollution upon which the parasites of success fatten and fester."
"Well, well, Rowland. Long ago, before you had grown quite so violent, I used to recommend you to come up to London; but now I would not think of doing so."
"Of course not; nor would I think of going, nor did I ever think of going. London is the grave of independence and self-respect. You cannot be yourself there. You must be the creature of somebody else or the tool of a clique. Give me the hillside and freedom----"
"And five hundred a-year if you are lucky, instead of London and fifteen thousand a-year----"
"And bowing and scraping, and heeling and toeing, and my-lording and my-ladying----"
"Well, well, well," said the great city physician; "I shall never be able to convert you. You are the only man I know in the country who I am sure ought to be in town."
"And you are the only man in town who I know ought to be in the country."