"fame!" how had he dreamt that he was promulgating secrets to make his kind better, and wiser, and truer to the great aims of life! How had Florence, and Florence alone, understood the beatings of his heart in every page! /And now/!--it so chanced that the work was reviewed in the paper he read--it was not only a hostile criticism, it was a personally abusive diatribe, a virulent invective. All the motives that can darken or defile were ascribed to him. All the mean spite of some mean mind was sputtered forth. Had the writer known the awful blow that awaited Maltravers at that time, it is not in man's nature but that he would have shrunk from this petty gall upon the wrung withers; but, as I have said, there is a terrible disconnection between the author and the man. The first is always at our mercy--of the last we know nothing. At such an hour Maltravers could feel none of the contempt that proud--none of the wrath that vain, minds feel at these stings. He could feel nothing but an undefined abhorrence of the world, and of the aims and objects he had pursued so long. Yet that even he did not then feel. He was in a dream; but as men remember dreams, so when he awoke did he loathe his own former aspirations, and sicken at their base rewards. It was the first time since his first year of inexperienced authorship that abuse had had the power even to vex him for a moment. But here, when the cup was already full, was the drop that overflowed. The great column of his past world was gone, and all else seemed crumbling away. At length Colonel Danvers entered. Maltravers drew him aside, and they left the club. "Danvers," said the latter, "the time in which I told you I should need your services is near at hand; let me see you, if possible, to-night." "Certainly--I shall be, at the House till eleven. After that hour you will find me at home." "I thank you." "Cannot this matter be arranged amicably?" "No, it is a quarrel of life and death." "Yet the world is really growing too enlightened for these old mimicries of single combat." "There are some cases in which human nature and its deep wrongs will be ever stronger than the world and its philosophy. Duels and wars belong to the same principle; both are sinful on light grounds and poor pretexts. But it is not sinful for a soldier to defend his country from invasion, nor for man, with a man's heart, to vindicate truth and honour with his life. The robber that asks me for money I am allowed to shoot. Is the robber that tears from me treasures never to be replaced, to go free? These are the inconsistencies of a pseudo-ethics, which, as long as we are made of flesh and blood, we can never subscribe to." "Yet the ancients," said Danvers, with a smile, "were as passionate as ourselves, and they dispensed with duels."