"All the same, I hate dropping research. It's stuff I'm made to do. About that, Solomonson, I'm almost superstitious. I could say I had a call.... It's the maddest state of affairs! Now that I'm doing absolutely my best work for mankind, work I firmly believe no one else can do, I just manage to get six hundred--nearly two hundred of my eight hundred is my own. What does the world think I could do better--that would be worth four times as much." "The world doesn't think anything at all about it," said Solomonson. "Suppose it did!" The thought struck Sir Rupert. He knitted his brows and looked hard obliquely at the smoke of his cigar. "Oh, it won't," he said, rejecting a disagreeable idea. "There isn't any world--not in that sense. That's the mistake you make, Trafford." "It's not what your work is worth," he explained. "It's what your advantages can get for you. People are always going about supposing--just what you suppose--that people ought to get paid in proportion to the good they do. It's forgetting what the world is, to do that. Very likely some day civilization will get to that, but it hasn't got to it yet. It isn't going to get to it for hundreds and hundreds of years." His manner became confidential. "Civilization's just a fight, Trafford--just as savagery is a fight, and being a wild beast is a fight,--only you have paddeder gloves on and there's more rules. We aren't out for everybody, we're out for ourselves--and a few friends perhaps--within limits. It's no good hurrying ahead and pretending civilization's something else, when it isn't. That's where all these socialists and people come a howler. Oh, _I_ know the Socialists. I see 'em at my wife's At Homes. They come along with the literary people and the artists' wives and the actors and actresses, and none of them take much account of me because I'm just a business man and rather dark and short, and so I get a chance of looking at them from the side that isn't on show while the other's turned to the women, and they're just as fighting as the rest of us, only they humbug more and they don't seem to me to have a decent respect for any of the common rules. And that's about what it all comes to, Trafford."