"I cannot believe," said Mr. Marsh with energy, "that any one would seriously entertain such wild ideas. They imply the negation of all the things we hold dear. I should commit suicide at once if I thought for a single moment such an outcome was possible." "Perhaps your captain had such a moment," suggested the young man, busily eating fish. "Perhaps he saw, as I said, the futility of existence." "And you really believe there is no hope?" "Hope!" echoed Lietherthal with a brazen-throated laugh. "Hear the Englishman crying for his hope! By what right or rule of logic can we demand an inexhaustible supply of hope, especially packed in hundredweight crates for export to the British Colonies? Hope! The finest brand on the market! Will not spoil in the tropics! Stow away from boilers! Use no hooks! That's all an Englishman thinks of if you ask him to consider a scientific question. Doctor, is there any hope? Hope for himself, not for anybody else." There was a murmur of laughter at this, a murmur in which even Mr. Marsh joined, for he "could see a joke" as he often admitted. And as the meal progressed and the excellent red wine passed, the young man revealed a nimble mind, like quicksilver rather than firm polished metal, which ran easily over the whole surface of life and entertained them with the aptness and scandalous candour of its expression. To most of them, men like Esther's husband, Mr. Jokanian, who had absorbed European ideas through books, so that they had fermented within him in a black froth of pessimism and socialistic bubbles, he was a blond angel from heaven. "A man of remarkable ideas," he observed to Mr. Spokesly, who nodded.