"When I talk like this, Cromlech chuckles, loves me as a show, despises me as a mind. Roger--young Roger Fitz-Archdeacon--is all an incredulous amazement. I don't wonder. There is nothing so small and nothing so great--nothing so primitive and not a thing so complex--nothing so unimportant and so engrossing as this 'duel of the sexes.' A proves it a trifle, and is held great. B reckons it all-supreme, and becomes popular. C (a woman) describes the Hunter Man. D (a man) descants of the Pursuit by Woman. The oldest thing is the most canvassed and the least comprehended. But there's a reputation--and I suppose money--in it for anybody who can string phrases. There's blood-red excitement for everybody who can feel. Yet I've played my part in other affairs--not so much in dull old England, where you work five years to become a Member of Parliament, and five years more in order to get kicked out again--but in places where in a night you rise or fall--in five minutes order the shooting-squad or face it--boil the cook or are stuffed into the pot yourself. (Cromlech, this is not exact scientific statement!) Yet always--everywhere--the woman! And why? On my honor, I don't know. What in the end is she? "I adjourn the question--and put a broader one. What am I? The human being as such? If I'm a vegetable, am I not a mistake? If I'm an animal, am I not a cruelty? If I'm a soul, am I not misplaced? I'd say 'Yes' to all this, save that I enjoy myself so much. Because I have forty thousand a year? Hardly. I've had nothing, and been as completely out of reach of getting anything as the veriest pauper that ever existed--and yet I've had the deuce of a fine existence the while. I think there's only one solid blunder been made about man--he oughtn't to have been able to think. It wastes time. It makes many people unhappy. That's not my case. I like it. It just wastes time. "That insinuating minx, possessed of a convenient dog and an ingratiating manner, insinuated to-day that I was handsome. Well, she's pretty, and I suppose we're both better off for it. It is an introduction. But to myself I don't seem very handsome. I have my pride--I look a gentleman. But I look a queer foreign fish. I found myself envying the British robustness of that fine young chap who is so misguided as to be a lawyer. "Ah, why do I object to lawyers? Tolstoi!--I used to say--or, at the risk of advanced intellects not recognizing one's allusions, one could go further back. But that is, in the end, all gammon. Every real conviction springs from personal experience. I hate the law because it interfered with me. I'm not aware of any better reason. So I'm going on without it--unless somebody tries to steal my forty thousand, of course. Ambrose, thou art a humbug--or, more precisely, thou canst not avoid being a human individual!"