Will the skill in rowing, the swiftness in running, the admirable capacity and endurance in other physical exercises, which he has attained, by a strenuous cultivation in this kind that has excluded any similarly strenuous cultivation in other kinds—­will these physical attainments help him to win a purely moral victory over his own selfishness and his own cruelty?  They won’t even help him to see that it is selfishness, and that it is cruelty.  The essential principle of his rowing and racing (a harmless principle enough, if you can be sure of applying it to rowing and racing only) has taught him to take every advantage of another man that his superior strength and superior cunning can suggest.  There has been nothing in his training to soften the barbarous hardness in his heart, and to enlighten the barbarous darkness in his mind.  Temptation finds this man defenseless, when temptation passes his way.  I don’t care who he is, or how high he stands accidentally in the social scale—­he is, to all moral intents and purposes, an Animal, and nothing more.  If my happiness stands in his way—­and if he can do it with impunity to himself—­he will trample down my happiness.  If my life happens to be the next obstacle he encounters—­and if he can do it with impunity to himself—­he will trample down my life.  Not, Mr. Delamayn, in the character of a victim to irresistible fatality, or to blind chance; but in the character of a man who has sown the seed, and reaps the harvest.  That, Sir, is the case which I put as an extreme case only, when this discussion began.  As an extreme case only—­but as a perfectly possible case, at the same time—­I restate it now.”

Before the advocates of the other side of the question could open their lips to reply, Geoffrey suddenly flung off his indifference, and started to his feet.

“Stop!” he cried, threatening the others, in his fierce impatience to answer for himself, with his clenched fist.

There was a general silence.

Geoffrey turned and looked at Sir Patrick, as if Sir Patrick had personally insulted him.

“Who is this anonymous man, who finds his way to his own ends, and pities nobody and sticks at nothing?” he asked.  “Give him a name!”

“I am quoting an example,” said Sir Patrick.  “I am not attacking a man.”

“What right have you,” cried Geoffrey—­utterly forgetful, in the strange exasperation that had seized on him, of the interest that he had in controlling himself before Sir Patrick—­“what right have you to pick out an example of a rowing man who is an infernal scoundrel—­when it’s quite as likely that a rowing man may be a good fellow:  ay! and a better fellow, if you come to that, than ever stood in your shoes!”