Sir John smiled. "My dear lady," he asked, "doesn't life consist largely of insults from the strong to the weak?" "And were all these people so weak, then?" "No, in their own way they were fairly important, I suppose, but compared to Morton they were weak--very weak--Ah, yes! I like this custom of smoking at table. Thanks!" He selected a cigarette deliberately, and stooped toward the proffered match. The flame illumined the swarthy curve of his beard and the heavy lines of his dark face. "You see," he began, straightening up in his chair, "the whole thing--that part of it, and the part I'm to tell--is really, if you choose, an allegory of strength, of strength and weakness. On the one side Morton--there's strength, sheer, undiluted power, the thing that runs the world; and on the other Bewsher, the ordinary man, with all his mixed-up ideas of right and wrong and the impossible, confused thing he calls a 'code'--Bewsher, and later on the girl. She too is part of the allegory. She represents--what shall I say? A composite portrait of the ordinary young woman? Religion, I suppose. Worldly religion. The religion of most of my good friends in England. A vague but none the less passionate belief in a heaven populated by ladies and gentlemen who dine out with a God who resembles royalty. And coupled with this religion the girl had, of course, as have most of her class, a very distinct sense of her own importance in the world; not that exactly--personally she was over-modest; a sense rather of her importance as a unit of an important family, and a deep-rooted conviction of the fundamental necessity of unimportant things: parties, and class-worship, and the whole jumbled-up order as it is. The usual young woman, that is, if you lay aside her unusual beauty. And, you see, people like Bewsher and the girl haven't much chance against a man like Morton, have they? Do you remember the girl, my dear?" he asked, turning to his wife. "Yes," murmured Lady Masters.