“I never knew a lecture that didn’t end in a free fight,” says his uncle Southwold, hurriedly. “But we can’t have one here, Wilfrid, there are too many ladies present.” A shabby little old gentleman, doubled up in his chair, who is his grace of Bridlington, murmurs doubtfully: “I don’t see how your theories would work, Bertram.” “Don’t you, Duke? Is there not such a proverb as _Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra_?” The duke nods, and coughs. “There is. But I am afraid it will land you in Queer Street sometimes. There’s another old saw, you know, ‘Look before you leap!’ Safer of the two, eh?” “For the selfish, no doubt,” replies Bertram. His hand is on his note-book; he is thinking with regret of the concluding passages which he has not been able to read, and a little also that Cicely Seymour, the young lady who snubs Marlow, has a very beautiful profile, as a white gauze hat laden with white lilac rests on the fair coils of her hair. That brute Marlow is at her elbow, saying something idiotic; Bertram cannot hear what, but he hears her laugh, and knows that she is probably being made to laugh at himself. The intruding Marlow’s jeer at his vegetarian views is unjust to him, for he is tall and well made, though slender; but then, as his people often tell him, his muscle was built up in the score of unregenerate years before his Oxford terms, when he was as philistine as any other Eton boy, though he liked his books better than the playing-fields. He is the younger son of a peer, has a little money of his own, and makes a little more by writing for scholarly reviews; but beyond all he is an altruist, a collectivist, a Fourrierist, an Engelist, a Tolstoi-ist; and, in common with other theorists, he has imagined that to be told the truth is enough to make people believe in it and observe its gospel. He has been continually deceived in this impression; but he has always held it, and it is proportionately irritating to him when, after having shed the light of information upon his contemporaries, they still show no symptoms of being converted. Even the old duke, who is his godfather, and is generally tender to his theories, does nothing but nod his head and repeat like a magpie: “Look before you leap!” “I think you said that property was like a cancer in the body politic?” observes a lover of practical politics, a Unionist member of parliament, putting his glass in his eye. “I said the consolidation and transmission of property was so,” replies Bertram, with some hauteur: people cannot even quote him correctly! “Ah! seems to me the same thing.” “No more the same thing than Seltzer and the Sellinger!” cries Marlow. “Oh, indeed,” says the politician, humbly; “forgive my stupidity.” Bertram implies by a gesture that his indulgence to human imbecility is inexhaustible, but sorely tried.