“You may not know that it is a low opinion. Nevertheless, it is so.” “Well, have it your own way. I’m wrong again; and you’re right.” “So far from being gratified by that, I had rather that we were both in the right and agreed. Can you understand that?” “I can’t say I do. But I give in to it. What more need you care for?” “I had rather you understood. Let me try to explain. You think that I like to be cleverer than other people. You are mistaken. I should like them all to know whatever I know.” Cashel laughed cunningly, and shook his head. “Don’t you make any mistake about that,” he said. “You don’t want anybody to be quite as clever as yourself; it isn’t in human nature that you should. You’d like people to be just clever enough to show you off--to be worth beating. But you wouldn’t like them to be able to beat you. Just clever enough to know how much cleverer you are; that’s about the mark. Eh?” Lydia made no further effort to enlighten him. She looked at him thoughtfully, and said, slowly, “I begin to hold the clew to your idiosyncrasy. You have attached yourself to the modern doctrine of a struggle for existence, and look on life as a perpetual combat.” “A fight? Just so. What is life but a fight? The curs forfeit or get beaten; the rogues sell the fight and lose the confidence of their backers; the game ones and the clever ones win the stakes, and have to hand over the lion’s share of them to the loafers; and luck plays the devil with them all in turn. That’s not the way they describe life in books; but that’s what it is.” “Oddly put, but perhaps true. Still, is there any need of a struggle? Is not the world large enough for us all to live peacefully in?” “YOU may think so, because you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But if you hadn’t to fight for that silver spoon, some one else had; and no doubt he thought it hard that it should be taken away from him and given to you. I was a snob myself once, and thought the world was made for me to enjoy myself and order about the poor fellows whose bread I was eating. But I was left one day where I couldn’t grab any more of their bread, and had to make some for myself--ay, and some extra for loafers that had the power to make me pay for what they didn’t own. That took the conceit out of me fast enough. But what do you know about such things?” “More than you think, perhaps. These are dangerous ideas to take with you into English society.” “Hmf!” growled Cashel. “They’d be more dangerous if I could give every man that is robbed of half what he earns twelve lessons--in science.” “So you can. Publish your lessons. ‘Twelve lectures on political economy, by Cashel Byron.’ I will help you to publish them, if you wish.” “Bless your innocence!” said Cashel: “the sort of political economy I teach can’t be learned from a book.”