"No doubt we live in times of commerce, rather than in those of chivalry," he remarked. "Still, I venture to think your condemnation is too sweeping. One should discriminate surely between trade and finance." "Only as one discriminates between a little dog and a big one. The little dog is the easier to kick. I can't get at the Rothschilds and Rockefellers; and so I go for the Farges and Worthingtons," Smyth answered. "In principle I am right. Trade, commerce, finance, juggle with the names as you like, it all comes back to the same thing in the end, namely, the murder of intellect by money. Comes back to the worship of Mammon, chosen ruler of this contemptible _fin de siècle_, and safe to be even more tyrannously the ruler of the coming century. What hope, I ask you, is left for us poor devils of literary men? None, absolutely none. Just in proportion as we honour our calling and refuse to prostitute our talents we are at a discount. The powers that be have no earthly use for us. We have not the ghost of a chance." He altered his position, looking quickly and nervously at his host. "I beg your pardon," he said. "For the moment I forgot you were on the other side, among the conquerors, not the conquered. Probably this conversation does not interest you in the least." "On the contrary, it interests me very deeply," Dominic replied gravely. "All the same, out of self-respect I ought to hold my tongue about it, I suppose. For I have accepted the position, Mr. Iglesias. I have learned to do that. Only on each fresh occasion that it is brought home to me--and it has been brought home abominably clearly to-night--my gorge rises at it. And it ought to be so. For it is an outrage--you yourself must admit--that a man who started with excellent prospects and with the consciousness of unusual talents--of genius, perhaps--should be ruined and broken, while every miserable little counter-jumper----" He leaned his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook. "For I have talent," he cried, in a curiously thin voice. "Before God I have. They may refuse to publish me, refuse to play me, force me to pick up scraps of hack-work on fourth-rate papers to earn a bare subsistence--at times hardly that. Yet all the same, no supercilious beast of an editor or actor-manager--curse the whole stinking lot--shall rob me of my faith in myself--of my belief that I am great--if I had justice, nothing less than that, I tell you, nothing less than great."