“Do you imagine I’m trying to argue with you, boy?” cried the other, bitterly.  “I could say a thousand things to the point, but I’ve no desire to say them.  I simply wish to state the thing fairly, to see how far you have worked through it.”

“I’ve thought it out rather more thoroughly than you, it seems to me, for at least I’m consistent.”

They were both offended; the elder biting his lip over sarcastic words, the younger flushed with hasty indignation.  Then, in a minute, the one put away his anger, and the other, forgetting the greater part of his, talked on.

“I’ll tell you the sort of thing that’s made me feel I should be a sneak to give it up.  Just after I left school I went back to visit old Thompson, and he and his wife took me to a ball at the Assembly Rooms.  It was quite a swell affair, and there weren’t enough men.  So old Thompson edged us up to a grand dame with a row of daughters, and I heard him in plethoric whisper informing her, as in duty bound, just who I was, ‘but,’ added he, as a compensating fact, ’there isn’t a finer or more gentlemanly fellow in the room.’  So the old hen turned round and took me in with one eye, all my features and proportions; but it wasn’t till Thompson told her that father was about to retire, and that I, of course, was looking to enter a higher walk, that she gave permission to trot me up.  Do you think I went?  They were pretty girls she had, and the music—­I’d have given something to dance that night; but if I was the sort of man she’d let dance with her girls, she needn’t have taken anything else into account; and if I was decent enough for them, it was because of something else in me other than what I did or didn’t do.  I swore then, by all that’s sweet—­by music and pretty girls and everything else—­that I’d carve carcases for the rest of my days, and if the ladies didn’t want me they might do without me.  You know how it was with father; all the professional men in the place were only too glad to have a chat with him in the reading-rooms and the hotel.  They knew his worth, but they wouldn’t have had him inside their own doors.  Well, the worse for their wives and daughters, say I. They did without him; they can do without me.  The man that will only have me on condition his trade is not mine can do without me too, and if it’s the same in a new country, then the new country be damned!”

The hot-headed speaker, striding about the room, stopped with the word that ended this tirade, and gave it out roundly.

“The thing is,” said Robert, “can you do without them—­all these men and women who won’t have you on your own terms?  They constitute all the men and women in the world for you and me, for we don’t care for the other sort.  Can you do without them?  I couldn’t.”  He said the “I couldn’t” first as if looking back to the time when he had broken loose from the family tradition; he repeated it more steadfastly, and it seemed to press pathetically into present and future—­“I couldn’t.”  The book that he had been idly swinging above his pillow was an old missal, and he lowered it now to shield his face somewhat from his brother’s downward gaze.