Yes, the whole secret of success was to know what one wanted to do, and not to be afraid to do it.  His own history was proving that already.  He had not been afraid to give up his small but safe position in a real-estate office for the precarious adventure of a private secretaryship; and his first glimpse of his new employer had convinced him that he had not mistaken his calling.  When one has a “way” with one—­as, in all modesty, Millner knew he had—­not to utilize it is a stupid waste of force.  And when he had learned that Orlando G. Spence was in search of a private secretary who should be able to give him intelligent assistance in the execution of his philanthropic schemes, the young man felt that his hour had come.  It was no part of his plan to associate himself with one of the masters of finance:  he had a notion that minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process.  The opportunity of a clever young man with a cool head and no prejudices (this again was drawn from life) lay rather in making himself indispensable to one of the beneficent rich, and in using the timidities and conformities of his patron as the means of his scruples about formulating these principles to himself.  It was not for nothing that, in his college days, he had hunted the hypothetical “moral sense” to its lair, and dragged from their concealment the various self-advancing sentiments dissembled under its edifying guise.  His strength lay in his precocious insight into the springs of action, and in his refusal to classify them according to the accepted moral and social sanctions.  He had to the full the courage of his lack of convictions.

To a young man so untrammelled by prejudice it was self-evident that helpless philanthropists like Orlando G. Spence were just as much the natural diet of the strong as the lamb is of the wolf.  It was pleasanter to eat than to be eaten, in a world where, as yet, there seemed to be no third alternative; and any scruples one might feel as to the temporary discomfort of one’s victim were speedily dispelled by that larger scientific view which took into account the social destructiveness of the benevolent.  Millner was persuaded that every individual woe mitigated by the philanthropy of Orlando G. Spence added just so much to the sum-total of human inefficiency, and it was one of his favourite subjects of speculation to picture the innumerable social evils that may follow upon the rescue of one infant from Mount Taygetus.

“We’re all born to prey on each other, and pity for suffering is one of the most elementary stages of egotism.  Until one has passed beyond, and acquired a taste for the more complex forms of the instinct—­”