‘You are talking utter nonsense, Fan,’ said Oliver, half amused, half angry. ‘There is nothing dishonouring in trade, any more than in a handicraft; you might have known that. There is dignity in any honest work which a man does in the sweat of his brow. It is idleness, however refined, which is clear degradation and a blot on the social economy. We have surely got a long way ahead of the early nations that committed every useful art to their slaves. When we go out now, with the laudable aim of civilising savages, don’t we first qualify ourselves—those of us who have spent our youth in the colleges—by graduating in carpenters’ and masons’ work, cooking and tailoring?’ ‘That may be the way among savages,’ said Fan, with a nice distinction, ‘but at home we have not, in practice at least, gone so far beyond the old theory.’ ‘My dear Fan, have you never heard that we are a nation of shopkeepers? How have you managed to shut your ears! In what corner have you been hiding?’ ‘Don’t laugh,’ said Fan, passionately; ‘I am not able to bear it. And you must know that when English people of the upper classes own to be shopkeepers, it is on a grand scale like the merchant princes of Venice.’ ‘Or Tyre and Sidon,’ suggested Oliver ‘and we know what they came to; but don’t starve your simile.’ ‘Trade, or anything on a grand scale,’ floundered Fan, ‘where the interests involved extend far and wide and where the petty details hardly reach the head trader, is very different from a small business, with its meanness and sordidness.’ ‘Call nothing common and unclean which human beings require,’ muttered Oliver; and then he could not resist resuming his banter. ‘I have you now, Fan; you go in for the gulf between wholesale and retail, in the comparative offences of selling a bar of iron and a tin-tack. What a humbug you are!’ She disdained to defend herself from an accusation which was particularly untrue and objectionable to her. ‘I am sensible that there is a tremendous amount of humbug in society in the present day. Doubtless it has existed in every generation, but in ours, I think, the crop is an unusually fine one,’ commented Oliver, with provoking coolness. He was swinging one leg with a laziness that had an irritation in the very slowness of the movement—monotonous as that of a pendulum. Then he stopped the pendulum, but caused it to quiver quickly, in a still more trying manner, until Fan, under the torture, was fain to cry out as if she had been a vixen. ‘If you don’t keep your leg still, this moment, Oliver, I—I believe I shall leap down into the water. You ought to have been whipped when you were a child till you learned to stand and sit still.’