“Look here,” said Harold March, abruptly, “you’ve been no end of a friend to me, and I never was so proud of a friendship before; but there’s something I must get off my chest.  The more I found out, the less I understood how you could stand it.  And I tell you I’m going to stand it no longer.”

Horne Fisher gazed across at him gravely and attentively, but rather as if he were a long way off.

“You know I always liked you,” said Fisher, quietly, “but I also respect you, which is not always the same thing.  You may possibly guess that I like a good many people I don’t respect.  Perhaps it is my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault.  But you are very different, and I promise you this:  that I will never try to keep you as somebody to be liked, at the price of your not being respected.”

“I know you are magnanimous,” said March after a silence, “and yet you tolerate and perpetuate everything that is mean.”  Then after another silence he added:  “Do you remember when we first met, when you were fishing in that brook in the affair of the target?  And do you remember you said that, after all, it might do no harm if I could blow the whole tangle of this society to hell with dynamite.”

“Yes, and what of that?” asked Fisher.

“Only that I’m going to blow it to hell with dynamite,” said Harold March, “and I think it right to give you fair warning.  For a long time I didn’t believe things were as bad as you said they were.  But I never felt as if I could have bottled up what you knew, supposing you really knew it.  Well, the long and the short of it is that I’ve got a conscience; and now, at last, I’ve also got a chance.  I’ve been put in charge of a big independent paper, with a free hand, and we’re going to open a cannonade on corruption.”

“That will be—­Attwood, I suppose,” said Fisher, reflectively.  “Timber merchant.  Knows a lot about China.”

“He knows a lot about England,” said March, doggedly, “and now I know it, too, we’re not going to hush it up any longer.  The people of this country have a right to know how they’re ruled—­or, rather, ruined.  The Chancellor is in the pocket of the money lenders and has to do as he is told; otherwise he’s bankrupt, and a bad sort of bankruptcy, too, with nothing but cards and actresses behind it.  The Prime Minister was in the petrol-contract business; and deep in it, too.  The Foreign Minister is a wreck of drink and drugs.  When you say that plainly about a man who may send thousands of Englishmen to die for nothing, you’re called personal.  If a poor engine driver gets drunk and sends thirty or forty people to death, nobody complains of the exposure being personal.  The engine driver is not a person.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Fisher, calmly.  “You are perfectly right.”

“If you agree with us, why the devil don’t you act with us?” demanded his friend.  “If you think it’s right, why don’t you do what’s right?  It’s awful to think of a man of your abilities simply blocking the road to reform.”