“He is my particular friend.”

“So I perceive.  I couldn’t shine as he shines, but I might gradually learn to ride after him at a respectful distance.  A man at Rome ought to do as the Romans do.”

“Why wasn’t Hoppet Hall Rome as much as Bragton?”

“Well;—­it wasn’t.  While fortune enabled me to be happy at Hoppet Hall—­”

“That is unkind, Reg.”

“While fortune oppressed me with celibate misery at Hoppet Hall, nobody hated me for not hunting;—­and as I could not very well afford it, I was not considered to be entering a protest against the amusement.  As it is now I find that unless I consent to risk my neck at any rate five or six times every winter, I shall be regarded in that light”

“I wouldn’t be frightened into doing anything I didn’t like,” said Mary.

“How do you know that I shan’t like it?  The truth is I have had a letter this morning from a benevolent philosopher which has almost settled the question for me.  He wants me to join a society for the suppression of British sports as being barbarous and antipathetic to the intellectual pursuits of an educated man.  I would immediately shoot, fish, hunt and go out ratting, if I could hope for the least success.  I know I should never shoot anything but the dog and the gamekeepers, and that I should catch every weed in the river; but I think that in the process of seasons I might jump over a hedge.”

“Kate will show you the way to do that”

“With Kate and Mr. Twentyman to help me, and a judicious system of liberal tips to Tony Tuppett, I could make my way about on a quiet old nag, and live respected by my neighbours.  The fact is I hate with my whole heart the trash of the philanimalist.”

“What is a-a—­I didn’t quite catch the thing you hate?”

“The thing is a small knot of self-anxious people who think that they possess among them all the bowels of the world.”

“Possess all the what, Reginald?”

“I said bowels,—­using an ordinary but very ill-expressed metaphor.  The ladies and gentlemen to whom I allude, not looking very clearly into the systems of pains and pleasures in accordance with which we have to live, put their splay feet down now upon this ordinary operation and now upon that, and call upon the world to curse the cruelty of those who will not agree with them.  A lady whose tippet is made from the skins of twenty animals who have been wired in the snow and then left to die of starvation—­”

“Oh, Reginald!”

“That is the way of it.  I am not now saying whether it is right or wrong.  The lady with the tippet will justify the wires and the starvation because, as she will say, she uses the fur.  An honest blanket would keep her just as warm.  But the fox who suffers perhaps ten minutes of agony should he not succeed as he usually does in getting away,—­is hunted only for amusement!  It is true that the one fox gives amusement for hours to perhaps some hundred; but it is only for amusement.  What riles me most is that these would-be philosophers do not or will not see that recreation is as necessary to the world as clothes or food, and the providing of the one is as legitimate a business as the purveying of the other.”