“No, you couldn’t,” repeated Alec soberly.  He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down half pityingly, perhaps with a touch of superiority.  “You couldn’t; but I can, and I’ll stand by my colours.  I should be a coward if I didn’t.”

Robert coloured under his look, under his words, so he turned away and stood by the window.  After a minute Robert spoke.

“You haven’t given me the slightest reason for your repeated assertion that you would be a coward.”

“Yes, I have.  That’s just what I’ve been saying.”

“You have only explained that you think so the more strongly for all opposition, and that may not be rational.  Other men can do this work and be thankful to get it; you can do higher work.”  His words were constrainedly patient, but they only raised clamour.

“I don’t know what you profess and call yourself!  What should I change for?  To pamper your pride and mine—­is that a worthy end?  To find something easier and more agreeable—­is that manly, when this has been put into my hand?  How do I know I could do anything better?  I know I can do this well.  As for these fine folks you’ve been talking of, I’ll see they get good food, wherever I am; and that’s not as easy as you think, nor as often done; and there’s not one of them that would do all their grand employments if they weren’t catered for; and as for the other men that would do it” (he was incoherent in his heat), “they do it pretty badly, some of them, just because they’re coarse in the grain; and you tell me it’ll make them coarser; well then, I, who can do it without getting coarse, will do it, till men and women stop eating butcher’s meat.  You’d think it more pious if I put my religion into being a missionary to the Chinese, or into writing tracts?  Well, I don’t.”

He was enthusiastic; he was perhaps very foolish; but the brother who was older had learned at least this, that it does not follow that a man is in the wrong because he can give no wiser reason for his course than “I take this way because I will take it.”

“Disarm yourself, old fellow,” he said.  “I am not going to try to dissuade you.  I tried that last year, and I didn’t succeed; and if I had promise of success now, I wouldn’t try.  Life’s a fearful thing, just because, when we shut our eyes to what is right in the morning, at noon it’s not given us to see the difference between black and white, unless our eyes get washed with the right sort of tears.”

Alec leaned his head out of the window; he felt that his brother was making a muff of himself, and did not like it.

“If you see this thing clearly,” Robert continued, “I say, go ahead and do it; but I want you just to see the whole of it.  According to you, I am on the wrong track; but I have got far along it, and now I have other people to consider.  It seems a pity, when there are only two of us in the world, that we should have to put half the world between us.  We used to have the name, at least