‘No doubt it is a great reward for her trouble and risk that you should call for her—behaving civilly in the performance of your duty, I take it for granted—once in three months,’ said Oliver, still in a fume. ‘I am not of your opinion. But though I have not the same faith in the light of my countenance, and the edification implied in the bestowal of my company for a spare half-hour, still I have my own views on the subject. But upon my honour, Fan, I hesitate at this moment under a sense of my unworthiness, and a conception of these respectable people’s positive virtues, to presume to weigh their comparative defects and measure them against any supposed superiority of intellect and training on my part. Are brains and culture—of which one hears so much from pedants and puppies—to be named in the same breath with honest men and women’s fidelity to their sense of right? But if the questionable superiority has an existence, am I not called upon by every dictate of true public spirit and good feeling to show that superiority by striving to do what I have already spoken of—raise the tone of my class, and lead it to higher aims and purer pleasures? Is not that a nobler ambition than to content myself with rising above my class—abandoning it to grovel in materialism, if not to wallow in the mire? Do you know that Kingsley said teachers and preachers to the rich and the poor were not wanting, but where was he who would go on a mission to the lower middle and small trading classes, and reclaim them from their special form of animalism and licence, “their irreverence and undutifulness,” as you put it. Do you believe the Bible, Fan, or do you hold that such injunctions as to preserve old landmarks and not to forget our own and our father’s friends, are out-of-date precepts—simply fit for Orientals?’ ‘You are clever, Oliver,’ said Fan, coldly. ‘I cannot pretend to vie with you in quotations misapplied.’ ‘As the devil is great in texts—no, you don’t mean that,’ said Oliver, trying to conjure back a friendly spirit into the dispute. He had smoked his pipe and was knocking out its ashes. There was silence for a time, and then he pointed out that the moon had risen unobserved while they were speaking. It was flooding the landscape with a light which, though it comes so often, never gives a familiar impression, but always produces an effect wholly removed from that of ordinary light, causing both heaven and earth to be changed for us, and to come out, in their every aspect, a more solemn and grander sky, a sadder and fairer world, than those we see by the beams of the sun.