The unexpected arrival of the Duke of Trent had caused her a thrill of pleasurable excitement. To make a good impression on the head of the family, she felt, would bring her half-way to the goal. Now, at the thought that she had been so near to disgracing herself, she could have bitten her tongue. Molly’s preoccupations were not shared by Alistair, who took it for granted that his brother had come to reproach him, and resented what seemed to him an impertinent intrusion. By this time he had drunk too much to care what he said or did, and the desire was strong upon him to wreak his bitter feelings on the head of his favoured elder. Staggering to his feet, and casting a disdainful look at the silent and annoyed Duke, he burst out: “I am a hooligan. I’ve been trying to disguise it ever since I was a boy, but I’m not going to try any more. I hate your law and order; I hate your respectability; I hate your civilization. Our forefathers were thieves and murderers, and I envy them. They lived a jolly life among the heather and the hills, and they were gentlemen. They didn’t cringe to cobblers and butchers for votes, and go to church on Sundays to please their grocer. They swore and drank and diced as much as they liked, and never asked what the Dissenters thought of them. I am sick of the strait-waistcoat; I am sick of swallow-tail coats and prayer-books. Why should I torture myself in the effort to lead your unnatural life? I protest against it all. Life is one long persecution of men like me, by men like you. Why can’t you leave me alone, as I leave you alone? I don’t force you to drink and gamble, and lead what you are pleased to call an immoral life. Why do you try to force me to lead a moral one?” He paused for a moment, and then, as if the overflow of his wrath had sobered him, went on in a more serious vein: “What is your ideal? Show me the man you honour, and I will show you the value of your morality. The hero of to-day is the successful cheat, the tradesman who has made a million by selling rotten food to the poor or to your own soldiers in South Africa; the bandit of the Stock Exchange; the monopolist who has broken the hearts and ruined the lives of a hundred struggling rivals, and who three hundred years ago would have been hanged as an engrosser. That is the man to whom you kneel, for whom all the doors of all the churches are thrown open, in whose name I am ordered to reform my ways.” The speaker seemed to feel the need of pointing his denunciation with a personal application.