"All right. Hanbury, I shall let you into a secret. I don't care for people who aren't nice. I prefer nice people. I like people like my wife and Dora, and your mother and yourself." "I am sure, sir, you are very good to include me in your list." "And I don't care at all for people who aren't nice, you know. I don't care at all for the poor. When they aren't objectionable they are an awful bore. For the life of me I can't make out what reasonable men and women see in the people. I don't object to them. I suppose they are necessary, and have their uses and functions, and all that; but if they have, why interfere with them? Lots of fellows I know go in for the poor partly out of fun, and for a change, and partly to catch votes. All right. But these fellows don't emigrate from the West and live in the East End. If they did, they'd go mad, my boy--they'd go mad. Anyway, I should. You know, I hate politics, and never talk politics. If I were a very rich man, I'd buy the whole of the Isle of Wight and banish all the poor from it, and live there the whole of my life, and drown any of the poor that dared to land on it. I wouldn't tell this to any soul in the world except you. I know I can trust you to keep my secret. Mind, I don't object to my wife and Dora doing what they like in such affairs; in fact, I rather like it, for it keeps matters smooth for me. This is, I know, a horribly wicked profession of faith; but I make it to you alone. I know that, according to poetic justice, I ought to be killed on my way to the club by a coster's run-away ass or the horse in a pauper's hearse, but I don't think I shall oblige poetic justice by falling into or under such a scheme--_I am always very careful at crossings_. If you are _very_ careful at crossings, I don't see how poetic justice is to get at you. There, let us drop this ghastly subject now." The conversation then wandered off into general ways, and lost its particular and personal character. Hanbury had never heard from any other man so cynical a speech as Ashton's, and he was considerably shocked and pained by it. His own convictions were few. He was himself in that condition of aimless aspiring enthusiasm proper to ardent youth, when youth has just begun to think conscientiously with a view to action. He could see nothing very clearly, but everything he did see shone fiercely in splendid clouds. This low view of life, this mere animal craving for peace and comfort, for nice things and nice people, was abhorrent to him. If in the early part of that day he had spoken slightingly of the people, it was out of no cynical indifference, but from the pain and worry caused to himself in his own mind by his opinions not being ascertained and fixed.