“Not exactly.  I mean that very few of us need to be as big as that.  It’s all very well for him; but most of us have to keep within the measure of our own capacity.”

“And sit down under him, while he looms up into God knows where?”

“Well, wouldn’t that be your idea?”

“Can’t say that it is.  My idea is that when I take my rights and keep them, I’m as big as any one.”

“Quite so; as big as any one—­who takes his rights and keeps them.  That’s very true.”

Ashley stopped, one hand behind him, the other supporting him as he leaned on the desk.  “And that’s what I propose to do,” he said, aggressively.

“It’s a very high ideal.”

“I propose to accept the status quo without asking any more questions.”

“I should think that would be a very good plan.  A wise man—­one of the wisest—­wrote, apropos of well-disposed people who were seeking a standard of conduct:  ’Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.’  I should think you’d have every reason for that kind of self-approval.”

“Do you mean that, sir? or are you—­trying it on?”

“I’m certainly not trying it on.  The man who takes his rights and keeps them can be amply justified.  If there’s a counsel of perfection that goes beyond that standard—­well, it isn’t given to all men to receive it.”

“Then you think it isn’t given to me.  You’d put me down as a good sort of chap who comes in second best.”

“What makes you think I should do that?”

“Because—­because—­hang it all!  If I let this fellow keep ahead of me—­why, I should come in second best.”

“You say keep ahead of me.  Do you think he’s ahead of you now?”

Ashley straightened himself.  He looked uncomfortable.  “He’s got a pull, by Jove!  He made that journey to France—­and cracked me up to the Marquise—­and wheedled her round—­when all the while he must have known that he was hammering nails into his own coffin.  He did it, too, after I’d insulted him and we’d had a row.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.  To a fellow like him that sort of thing comes easy.”

“It wouldn’t come easy to me, by Jove!”

“Then it would be all the more to your credit, if you ever did anything of the kind.”

The Englishman bounded away.  Once more he began to pace the floor restlessly.  The old man took his pipe from a tray, and his tobacco-pouch from a drawer.  Having filled the bowl, with meditative leisure he looked round for a match.  “Got a light?”

Ashley struck a vesta on the edge of his match-box and applied it to the old man’s pipe.

“Should you say,” he asked, while doing it, “that I ought to attempt anything in that line?”

“Certainly not—­unless you want to—­to get ahead.”

“I don’t want to stay behind.”

“Then, it’s for you to judge, my son.”

There was something like an affectionate stress on the two concluding monosyllables.  Ashley backed off, out of the lamplight.