‘I don’t know anything about your Sir Walter Scott,’ growled Mr. Sivewright; ‘I suppose it is natural to youth to look at all things brightly, though I have known youth that didn’t. You talk gaily enough for a young man who devotes no time to pleasure.’ ‘Do you think pleasure—in the common acceptation of the word, meaning late hours and mixed company—really conduces to good spirits?’ ‘Only as opium engenders sleep—to leave a man three times as wakeful afterwards,’ said Mr. Sivewright. ‘I have done without that kind of pleasure myself throughout a long life, yet I hardly count myself wise. Fairly to estimate the lightness of his own particular burden, a man should try to carry a heavier one. There is no better tonic for the hard-worker than a course of pleasure. You are in some trade or profession, I presume,’ he added, turning his sharp glance upon his companion; ‘a clerk, perhaps?’ ‘No; but something that works harder than a clerk. A parish doctor.’ Mr. Sivewright recoiled palpably. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ said Lucius; ‘it was not as a possible patient that I pulled you out of the cab. My practice doesn’t lie among the upper classes.’ ‘Nor do I belong to the upper classes,’ answered the other quickly. ‘I forgive you your profession, though I am among those prejudiced people who have an innate aversion from doctors, lawyers, and parsons. But the machinery of commerce won’t allow us to dispense with the lawyers; and I suppose among the poor there still lingers a remnant of the old belief that there’s some use in doctors. The parsons thrive upon the foolishness of women. So there is a field still left for your three learned professions.’ ‘That way of talking is a fashion,’ said Lucius quietly; ‘but I daresay if you were seriously ill to-morrow, your thoughts would turn instinctively towards Savile-row. And perhaps if you were going to die, you’d feel all the happier if the friendly voice of your parish priest breathed familiar words of hope and comfort beside your pillow.’ ‘I know nothing of my parish, except that its rates are four-and-twopence in the pound,’ returned the other in his incisive voice.