“The facilities over there are too great. Nothing’s worth while but what’s difficult,” said Jackson with a sententious ring that quite distressed his mate. “Well, they’ve got their backs up, I can see that. I’m glad you like it. Only if they despise your profession what will they say to that of your friends? If they think you’re queer what would they think of me?” asked Sidney Feeder, whose spirit was not as a general thing in the least bitter, but who was pushed to this sharpness by a conviction that—in spite of declarations which seemed half an admission and half a denial—his friend was suffering worry, or really perhaps something almost like humiliation, for the sake of a good that might be gathered at home on every bush. “My dear fellow, all that’s ‘rot’!” This had been Jackson’s retort, which expressed, however, not half his feeling. The other half was inexpressible, or almost, springing as it did from his depth of displeasure at its having struck even so genial a mind as Sidney Feeder’s that in proposing to marry a daughter of the highest civilisation he was going out of his way—departing from his natural line. Was he then so ignoble, so pledged to inferior things, that when he saw a girl who—putting aside the fact that she hadn’t genius, which was rare, and which, though he prized rarity, he didn’t want—seemed to him the most naturally and functionally founded and seated feminine subject he had known, he was to think himself too different, too incongruous, to mate with her? He would mate with whom he “damn pleased”; that was the upshot of Jackson Lemon’s passion. Several days elapsed during which everybody—even the pure-minded, like poor Sidney—seemed to him very abject.