“Certainly,” said Hurstmanceaux with great warmth. “A society is utterly rotten and ruined when such a fungus as this can take root in it. That I have always maintained. ‘Tell me whom you know and I will tell you what you are,’ is as true when said of society as when it is said of an individual. Certainly society only knows this man, this Massarene, in a perfunctory supercilious way, and only gives him the kind of nod which is the equivalent of a kick; but it does know him; it drinks his wines and eats his dinners; it nods to him, it elects him, it leaves cards on him; it lets him look ridiculous in white breeches and a gilded coat at St. James’s, and it makes him pay through the nose for all its amiabilities and tolerations. It is an infamy!” She looked straight before her down the road and did not reply. “You said you agreed with me?” said Hurstmanceaux, surprised at her silence. “I agree with you entirely.” But there was a chillness in her tone which suggested to him that, however completely she shared his opinions, the subject was disagreeable to her. “She can’t belong to that class herself, she is thoroughbred down to the ground,” he thought, as he said aloud, “I am afraid you are tired. The cold is beginning to tell on you.” “No; I am not at all cold,” she answered, holding up nearer to her the poor violets shrivelling in the frost. “What has come over her, I wonder,” he said to himself. “She was so frank and natural and pleasant, and now she is chilly and stiff, and scarcely opens her lips. It is since I spoke of Vale Royal. But she said she agreed with me. Perhaps she knows Gerald, and is fond of him. But he could hardly know anybody intimately whom I have never seen, or never heard of, at the least.” “Yet there is this to be said. You blame this person,” she added in a low but clear tone as she walked on, looking straight before her. “You admit that your world is more contemptible than he. What obliged Lord Roxhall to live in such a manner that he was forced to sell his old estate? Are not nearly all of you tradesmen and horse-dealers and speculators? Who fill the markets with game, the wharfs with coal, the shows with fat cattle and brood-mares? Who breed herds of Shetland ponies to sell them to the cruel work of the mines? Who destroy all the wild-bird life of three kingdoms, that the slaughter of the battues may be wholesale and the pheasants sent in thousands to Leadenhall? Your own order, your own order. What has it done, what does it ever do, to make it so superior to the man from Dakota?” Hurstmanceaux listened in extreme astonishment. He could not understand the scorn and suppressed vehemence with which her words vibrated. He was silent because, in his own mind, he found the indictment a just one. But his aristocratic temper was in conflict with his intellectual judgment.