He was very human, too; but he did demand certain standards of conduct. There was nothing he hated like snobbishness--he would always speak to anybody, no matter what he had done; but beyond that he respected himself and his friends too much to venture. When the men at his club pointed out, with their knowing winks, that a certain woman was "outside"--well, that was enough for him. He would never do anything to push her further down, but he could at least warn his friends. And he had an infinite disgust, a pitying contempt for those who suggested that circumstances may have had something to do with it. As though it were not the prime business of every human being to fight circumstances; as though he himself might not have been a regular Mark Lennan if he had let himself go. Every man had these things in him. That was the trouble with such writers as Galsworthy:--they helped people to tolerate weakness, even to see a certain beauty in it. It had got to be the fashion, especially among "literary" circles, to break away from standardizations. The persons who did so were given credit for living a fuller Life. How he hated their talk--what rot it was to suppose that any life could be full or rich unless it were a good life. And if there was anything in the world, in these hysterical times, to which a man could anchor, it was the fact that good was good and bad was bad, and even a child knew which was which. There was no arguing about it. But people seldom argued with him because he disarmed them beforehand by declaring that it didn't matter what any one thought: all these things had been settled for us long ago; they were the very bulwark of our progress, our prosperity, our whole civilization. It was strange that the people who most enjoyed the benefits of that civilization should be the ones to abuse it. If one must know outcasts (and one might of course be able to help them) let him confine the acquaintanceship to his office or some place where he would not run the risk of influencing other people. He remembered with horror a woman he had once known who could never understand these distinctions. He had not tried to dissuade her from knowing any one in the world she wanted to know; but he had begged her to be discreet about it, at least--to remember her responsibilities in the matter on account of her friends, and to be sure that "those people" were made to feel the inevitable barrier between. "Good God!" he had said, "I'm democratic and all that; but you can't let people of that sort feel they're your equals!" Eventually he stopped worrying about the woman--after she told him that she would be proud to be as big and fine as those friends of hers. What was the use? She must have been a little insane all the time; because he knew that she was a good woman, and those "friends" of hers were the sort who believed in free love and that kind of thing--some of them had even been in jail for preaching anarchism.