‘There you have the man!’ cried Earwaker.  ’How do you class such a mind as that?  Ten to one this is some Quixotic obligation he has laid upon himself, and probably he has gone without even a handbag.’

‘Vocally delivered,’ said Peak, ’this would represent a certain stage of drunkenness.  I suppose it isn’t open to such an explanation?’

‘Malkin never was intoxicated, save with his own vivacity.’

They discussed the singular being with good-natured mirth, then turned by degrees to other topics.

‘I have just come across a passage that will delight you,’ said Earwaker, taking up a book.  ‘Perhaps you know it.’

He read from Sir Thomas Brown’s Pscudodoxia Epidemica. ’"Men’s names should not only distinguish them.  A man should be something that all men are not, and individual in somewhat beside his proper name.  Thus, while it exceeds not the bound of reason and modesty, we cannot condemn singularity. Nos numerus sumus is the motto of the multitude, and for that reason are they fools."’

Peak laughed his approval.

‘It astonishes me,’ he said, lighting his pipe, ’that you can go on writing for this Sunday rag, when you have just as little sympathy with its aims as I have.  Do get into some less offensive connection.’

‘What paper would you recommend?’ asked the other, with his significant smile.

‘Why need you journalise at all?’

’On the whole, I like it.  And remember, to admit that the multitude are fools is not the same thing as to deny the possibility of progress.’

‘Do you really believe yourself a democrat, Earwaker?’

’M—­m—­m!  Well, yes, I believe the democratic spirit is stronger in me than any other.’

Peak mused for a minute, then suddenly looked up.

‘And what am I?’

‘I am glad nothing much depends on my successfully defining you.’

They laughed together.

‘I suppose,’ said Godwin, ’you can’t call a man a democrat who recognises in his heart and soul a true distinction of social classes.  Social, mark.  The division I instinctively support is by no means intellectual.  The well-born fool is very often more sure of my respect than the working man who struggles to a fair measure of education.’

Earwaker would have liked to comment on this with remarks personal to the speaker, but he feared to do so.  His silence, however, was eloquent to Peak, who resumed brusquely.

’I am not myself well-born,—­though if my parents could have come into wealth early in their lives, perhaps I might reasonably have called myself so.  All sorts of arguments can be brought against my prejudice, but the prejudice is ineradicable.  I respect hereditary social standing, independently of the individual’s qualities.  There’s nothing of the flunkey in this, or I greatly deceive myself.  Birth in a sphere of refinement is desirable and respectable; it saves one, absolutely, from many forms of coarseness.  The masses are not only fools, but very near the brutes.  Yes, they can send forth fine individuals—­but remain base.  I don’t deny the possibility of social advance; I only say that at present the lower classes are always disagreeable, often repulsive, sometimes hateful.’