"You have certainly kept out of the way of--nearly everything." "For my part, I daresay I am hopelessly out of date, but I value beauty and peace and simplicity higher than a noisy success. But a noisy success is the one thing that counts nowadays." "Does it?" "And Grenfell has taken the right steps to gain it. If a man craves for popularity, if he really thinks the bubble worth striving for, he must lay himself out for it. If he wants a place he must jostle for it. If he wants power he must discard scruples. If he wants social success it can be got--we see it every day--by pandering to the susceptibilities and seeking the favour of influential persons. Everything has its price. I don't say that everyone obtains these things who is ready to bid for them. But some do. Grenfell is among those who have. I don't blame him. I am not sure that I don't rather envy him." The Bishop could respect a conviction. "Are you not forgetting Grenfell's character?" he said gently, as one speaks to a sick man. "Think of him, his nobility, his integrity, his enthusiasm, his transparent unworldliness which so often in the old days put us all to shame!" "That is just what makes it all so painful to me," said Wentworth, and there was no possibility of doubting his sincerity. "That contact with the world can taint even beautiful natures like his. He was my ideal at one time. I almost worshipped him at Cambridge." "I love him still," said the Bishop. "A cat may look at a king, so I suppose a poor crawler of a bishop may look at a man like Grenfell. Don't you think, Wentworth, that sometimes a man who succeeds may have worked as nobly as a man who fails--you always speak so feelingly of failure, it is one of the many things I like about you. Don't you think that perhaps sometimes success may be--I don't say it always is--as high-minded as failure, that a hard-won victory may be as honourable as defeat, that achievement may _sometimes_ be the result not of chance or interest, but of unremitting toil? Don't you think you may be unconsciously cutting yourself adrift from Grenfell's friendship by attributing his success to unworthy means which a man like him could never have stooped to?" "It is he who has cut himself adrift from me," said Wentworth icily. "I have not changed." "That is just it. A slight change, shall we say expansion on your part, might have enabled you to"--the Bishop chose his words as carefully as a doctor counts drops into a medicine glass--"to keep pace with him?" "I do not regard friendship as a race or a combat of wits," said Wentworth. "Friendship is to my mind something sacred. I hope I can remain Grenfell's friend without believing him to be absolutely faultless. If he is so unreasonable as to expect that of me, which I should not for a moment expect of him, why then----" Wentworth shrugged his shoulders. One of the few friends who had not drifted from him looked at him with somewhat pained affection.