“You see,” he said, and he shook his head slowly, “perhaps it’s only a case of a square peg and a round hole. I don’t know. If you’d had him you’d have let him be a loafer all his life. Perhaps that’s all he’s really fitted for. Possibly, by shoving him on to do things, Pauline and I--or I principally--have brought this sort of thing on. Englishmen haven’t any sense of responsibility. Perhaps it’s bad for them to have it aroused in them. They can work; they can fight; they can do things; but it’s for themselves alone. They’re individualists. But there is a class that’s got the sense of duty to the whole. They’ve got a rudimentary sense of it--a tradition, at least, if not a sense. And Leicester comes of that class. But the tradition’s dying out. I suppose it was never native to them. It was forced on them because _someone_ had to do the public work and it was worth their while. But now that’s changing, it isn’t worth while. So no doubt Dudley hadn’t got it in his blood.... And yet I don’t know,” he said; “he’s shaped so well. I would have sworn he had it in him to do it with careful nursing. And Pauline had it in her--the sense of the whole, of the clan, the class, the county, and all the rest of it. Women have it much more often than men. That’s why she isn’t going for you. Only the other day she said to me: ‘I’m not the sort of girl to give ourselves away.’” “Now, look here,” she said, “what right have you, a confounded foreigner, to run us down? We take you up; we let you be one of us, and then you gas. There’s a great deal too many of you in the country. Taken as you are, on your own showing, poor dear Dudley, that you patronize--damn you--is worth a score of you. If you’re so set on the public service why isn’t it you who’s standing for Parliament instead of him? You’re ten times as rich. You’ve a hundred times more the gift of the gab ...” and she broke off, to begin again. “Whatever you can say of him,” she said “he doesn’t go nosing out secrets and peeping and prying. He is straight and clear, and as innocent as a baby, and as honest as a die....” “If he’s as honest as a die,” Robert Grimshaw said, “why was he carrying on an intrigue with you all that time? He must have been pretty deep to keep it concealed from me.” She looked up at him with pale fury. “Oh, you horrible-minded man!” she said. “How dare you! How dare you! You may kick me as much as you like. I am down. But you let Dudley Leicester alone. He’s too decent to be jumped on by a man like you.” Grimshaw displayed a sudden and incomprehensible agitation. “Then he hadn’t been carrying on with you?” he said. “Carrying on with me?” she mocked him, but with a bitter scorn. “Do you mean to say that you suspected him of that? I suppose you suspected him of fooling about with me before he was married to his Pauline, and after? What an unspeakable toad of a mind you’ve got!” Robert Grimshaw said, “Good God!”