“I haven’t the knack of it.  I seem to stand beside myself and jeer all the while.  Besides, it would be opposing complete sincerity with a very shady substitute.  That man Stocks is at least an honest fool.  I met him the other day after he had been talking some atrocious nonsense.  I asked him as a joke how he could be such a humbug, and he told me quite honestly that he believed every word; so, of course, I apologized.  He was attacking you people on your foreign policy, and he pulled out a New Testament and said, ‘What do I read here?’ It went down with many people, but the thing took away my breath.”

His companion looked perplexedly at the speaker.  “You have had the wrong kind of education, Lewie.  You have always been the spoiled child, and easily and half-unconsciously you have mastered things which the self-made man has to struggle towards with a painful conscious effort.  The result is that you are a highly cultured man without any crudeness or hysteria, while the other people see things in the wrong perspective and run their heads against walls and make themselves miserable.  You gain a lot, but you miss one thing.  You know nothing of the heart of the crowd.  Oh, I don’t mean the people about Etterick.  They are your own folk, and the whole air of the place is semi-feudal.  But the weavers and artisans of the towns and the ordinary farm workers—­what do you know of them?  Your precious theories are so much wind in their ears.  They want the practical, the blatantly obvious, spiced with a little emotion.  Stocks knows their demands.  He began among them, and at present he is but one remove from them.  A garbled quotation from the Scriptures or an appeal to their domestic affections is the very thing required.  Moreover, the man understands an audience.  He can bully it, you know; put on airs of sham independence to cover his real obeisance; while you are polite and deferent to hide your very obvious scorn.”

“Do you know, Tommy, I’m a coward,” Lewis broke in.  “I can’t face the people.  When I see a crowd of upturned faces, crass, ignorant, unwholesome many of them, I begin to despair.  I cannot begin to explain things from the beginning; besides, they would not understand me if I did.  I feel I have nothing in common with them.  They lead, most of them, unhealthy indoor lives, their minds are half-baked, and their bodies half-developed.  I feel a terrible pity, but all the same I cannot touch them.  And then I become a coward and dare not face them and talk straight as man to man.  I repeat my platitudes to the ceiling, and they go away thinking, and thinking rightly, that I am a fool.”

Wratislaw looked worried.  “That is one of my complaints.  The other is that on certain occasions you cannot hold yourself in check.  Do you know you have been blackguarded in the papers lately, and that there is a violent article against you in the Critic, and all on account of some unwise utterances?”