"You have got the stick by the wrong end altogether," I broke in, for the sake of justice; "we let them alone, for the excellent reason that we knew they wished to be let alone. No Englishman ever endeavours to push through a gate that is always bolted. Our neighbourhood took no notice of them, because it was known from the very first that they came there for that purpose. And living in a wilderness of ivied ruins----" "You appear to have turned against them, even more than their behaviour warrants. But for all that, Sûr Imar is a really great man. He looks at things differently from you and me; and it is not for us to judge him. For, like all men who go in for what we don't care about, he is set down as a crank, a dreamer, a man with a tile off, a fellow you would like to toss for sovereigns with, and everything else that a cad of the gutter pities and sucks up to. But I can tell you that the Lesghian old man, as the idiots would call him at forty-five, may defy a Polish Jew to cheat him. For I don't call it cheating a man, when he knows it, and lets you do it, because he scorns you and the cash alike. When you cheat him you are like a man who steals his house-water from a horse-trough, and you deserve to get glanders for it. But what I call fine cheating is to get twice the value of a thing out of a wiry old screw, whose money is his life, and his life all money. Oh, yes! There is some joy in that." Signor Nicolo rubbed his hands, and then put them into the feeling of his pockets, with a warmth of some rich memory--not very old, I daresay. "But you would never do such a thing as that?" I asked, with a little doubt quivering in the question. "You would be far above all such ideas?" "Would I? Of course I would, when I couldn't get the chance. And I would never get the better of a real friend, beyond twenty-five per cent at maximum. And he would make seventy-five on that at the West End. But when a man I hate with a fine religious strength, comes here to get the best of me, screwing up his mouth, and looking righteous, and as cordial as a stewed Spanish onion--'oh, dear, how lovely! A little flat in the culet--would be perfect but for that milky spot below the zone,' and so on; for what did the Almighty make a man except to chisel such a curmudgeon? Ah, yes, I have done it a hundred times, and hope I may be spared to do it a thousand more. It is not for the money, it is the intellectual triumph. Everybody knows what I am. Come to me fairly, and I treat you fairly. Must have my living wage, of course. But no more, unless you try to rob me. Then you have got the wrong pig by the ear. And it's the very same thing in love, Mr. Cranleigh. Have you tried to take a rise out of Dariel?"