"Oh, your dislike of fashionable people is a mere bundle of prejudice!" Lionel cried. "The truth is, Maurice, you don't know those fashionable people you seem to despise so heartily. If you did, you would discover that they had the ordinary human qualities of other people--only that they are better educated and more courteous and pleasant in manner. Then their benevolence--if you knew how much they give away in charity--" "Benevolence!" Mangan broke in, impatiently. "What is benevolence? It is generally nothing more or less than an expression of your own satisfaction with yourself. You are stuffed with food and wine; your purse is gorged; 'here's a handful of sovereigns for you, you poor devil crouching at the corner!' What merit is in that? Do you call that a virtue? But where charity really becomes a heroism, Linn, is when a poor, suffering, neuralgic woman, without any impulse from abundance of health or abundance of comfort, sets laboriously to work to do what she can for her fellow-creatures. Then that is something to regard--that is something to admire--" Lionel burst out laughing. "A very pretty description of Francie Wright!" he cried. "Francie a poor, suffering, wretched woman--because she happened to have a touch of neuralgia the last Sunday you were down here! There's very little of the poor and suffering about Francie; she's as contented and merry a lass as you'd find anywhere." Mangan was silent for a second or two; and then he said, with a little hesitation, "Didn't you tell me Miss Wright had not been up yet to see 'The Squire's Daughter?'" "No, she has not," Lionel answered, lightly. "I don't know whether you have been influencing her, Maurice, or whether you have picked up some of her highly superior prejudices; anyhow, I rather fancy she doesn't quite approve of the theatre--I mean, I don't think she approves of the New Theatre, for she'd go to any other one fast enough, I suppose, if you could only get her away from her sick children. But not the New Theatre, apparently. Perhaps she doesn't care to see me making myself a motley to the view." "She has a great regard for you, Linn. I wouldn't call her opinions prejudices," Mangan said--but with the curious diffidence he displayed whenever he spoke of Lionel's cousin. "Oh, Francie should have lived in the fifteenth century--she would have been a follower of Savonarola," Lionel said, with a laugh. "She's far too exalted for these present days."