“But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?” asked Prothero.

“That is another question,” said Benham.

“Exactly,” said Sir Godfrey.  “That is another question.  But speaking with some special knowledge, I should say that on the whole the people who are on the top of things ought to be on the top of things.  I agree with Aristotle that there is such a thing as a natural inferior.”

“So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero,” said Lady Marayne, “he thinks that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior.  It’s quite simple. . . .”

It made Prothero none the less indignant with this, that there was indeed a grain of truth in it.  He hated superiors, he felt for inferiors.

10

At last came the hour of tipping.  An embarrassed and miserable
Prothero went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.

It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his mother. . . .

Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her.  The controversy that should have split these two young men apart had given them a new interest in each other.  When afterwards she sounded her son, very delicately, to see if indeed he was aware of the clumsiness, the social ignorance and uneasiness, the complete unsuitability of his friend, she could get no more from him than that exasperating phrase, “He has ideas!”

What are ideas?  England may yet be ruined by ideas.

He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that monster packet of everything.  He ought to have gone to some little good college, good all through.  She ought to have asked some one who knew.

11

One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to Drayton—­they had been talking of Eugenics and the “family”—­Benham was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze.  “Whup there!” said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately brutal, and Benham, roused from that abstraction which is partly fatigue, had to jump aside and stumbled against the parapet as the gaunt pacer went pounding by.

Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers.  And passed.

“Damnation!” said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very white.

Then presently.  “Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble.”

“That,” said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, “that is the feeling of democracy.”

“I walk because I choose to,” said Benham.

The thing rankled.

“This equestrianism,” he began, “is a matter of time and money—­time even more than money.  I want to read.  I want to deal with ideas. . . .

“Any fool can drive. . . .”

“Exactly,” said Prothero.

“As for riding, it means no more than the elaborate study and cultivation of your horse.  You have to know him.  All horses are individuals.  A made horse perhaps goes its round like an omnibus, but for the rest. . . .”