“Ralph’s hopeless,” said Tom.  “He was born a pirate, you weren’t, Hughie.  We think there’s a chance for his salvation, don’t we, Perry?”

I refused to accept the remark as flattering.

Another object of their assaults was Frederick Grierson, who by this time had emerged from obscurity as a small dealer in real estate into a manipulator of blocks and corners.

“I suppose you think it’s a lawyer’s business to demand an ethical bill of health of every client,” I said.  “I won’t stand up for all of Tallant’s career, of course, but Mr. Wading has a clear right to take his cases.  As for Grierson, it seems to me that’s a matter of giving a dog a bad name.  Just because his people weren’t known here, and because he has worked up from small beginnings.  To get down to hard-pan, you fellows don’t believe in democracy,—­in giving every man a chance to show what’s in him.”

“Democracy is good!” exclaimed Perry.  “If the kind of thing we’re coming to is democracy, God save the state!"...

On the other hand I found myself drawing closer to Ralph Hambleton, sometimes present at these debates, as the only one of my boyhood friends who seemed to be able to “deal with conditions as he found them.”  Indeed, he gave one the impression that, if he had had the making of them, he would not have changed them.

“What the deuce do you expect?” I once heard him inquire with good-natured contempt.  “Business isn’t charity, it’s war.

“There are certain things,” maintained Perry, stoutly, “that gentlemen won’t do.”

“Gentlemen!” exclaimed Ralph, stretching his slim six feet two:  We were sitting in the Boyne Club.  “It’s ungentlemanly to kill, or burn a town or sink a ship, but we keep armies and navies for the purpose.  For a man with a good mind, Perry, you show a surprising inability to think things, out to a logical conclusion.  What the deuce is competition, when you come down to it?  Christianity?  Not by a long shot!  If our nations are slaughtering men and starving populations in other countries,—­are carried on, in fact, for the sake of business, if our churches are filled with business men and our sky pilots pray for the government, you can’t expect heathen individuals like me to do business on a Christian basis,—­if there is such a thing.  You can make rules for croquet, but not for a game that is based on the natural law of the survival of the fittest.  The darned fools in the legislatures try it occasionally, but we all know it’s a sop to the ‘common people.’  Ask Hughie here if there ever was a law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn’t get ‘round’?  Why, you’ve got competition even among the churches.  Yours, where I believe you teach in the Sunday school, would go bankrupt if it proclaimed real Christianity.  And you’ll go bankrupt if you practise it, Perry, my boy.  Some early, wide-awake, competitive, red-blooded bird will relieve you of the Boyne Street car line.”