’But I thought you didn’t know them?’ said someone.  ‘That’s just it,’ said Charles Lamb, ’I never can hate anyone that I know!’ The best bred man is the man who finds it easy to get on with everybody on equal terms:  but it’s part of the snobbishness of human nature that exclusiveness is rather admired than otherwise.  There’s a delightfully exclusive woman in one of Henry James’ novels, who refuses to be introduced to a family.  She entirely declines, and the man who is anxious to effect the introduction says, ’I can’t think why you object to them.’  ‘They are hopelessly vulgar,’ says the incisive lady, ’and in this short life, that is enough!’ But St. Paul’s remark is really very good, because it means ’Treat everyone with courtesy—­but reserve your fine affections for the inner circle, whose worth you really know!’—­it’s a better theory than that of the man who said, ’It is enough for me to be with those whom I love!’ That’s rather inhuman.”

“Do you remember,” said Barthrop, “the lines in Tennyson’s Guinevere, which sum up the knightly attributes?

  “’High thought, and amiable words,
  And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
  And love of truth, and all that makes a man.’”

“That’s very interesting and curious!” said Father Payne.  “Dear me, I had forgotten that—­did Tennyson say that?—­Come—­let’s have it again!”

Barthrop repeated the lines again.

“Now, that’s the gentlemanly ideal of the sixties,” said Father Payne, “and, good heavens, how offensive it sounds!  The most curious part of it really is ’the desire of fame’—­of course, a hundred years ago, no one made any secret of that!  You remember Nelson’s frank confession, made not once, but many times, that he pursued glory, ’Defeat—­or Westminster Abbey’—­didn’t he say that?”

“But surely people pursue fame as much as ever?” said Vincent.

“I daresay,” said Father Payne, “but it isn’t now considered good taste to say so.  You have got to pretend, at all events, that you wish to benefit humanity now-a-days.  If a man had said to Ruskin or Carlyle, ’Why do you write all these books?’ and they replied, ’It is because of my desire for fame,’ it would have been thought vulgar.  There’s that odd story of Robert Browning, when he received an ovation at Oxford, and someone said to him, ‘I suppose you don’t care about all this,’ he said, ’It is what I have waited for all my life!’ I wonder if he did say it!  I think he must have done, because it is exactly the sort of thing that one is supposed not to say—­and I confess I don’t like it—­it seems to me vain, and not proud, I don’t mind a kind of pride—­I think a man ought to know what he is worth:  but I hate vanity.  Perhaps that’s only because I haven’t been a success myself.”

“But mayn’t you desire fame?” said Vincent.  “It seems to me rather priggish to condemn it!”

“Many fine things sound priggish when they are said,” said Father Payne.  “But, to be frank, I don’t think that a man ought to desire fame.  I think he may desire to do a thing well.  I don’t think he ought to desire to do it better than other people.  It is the wanting to beat other people which is low.  Why not wish them to do it well too?”