A month later the Foreign Office made him the offer which his sense of personal dignity demanded from them; and, honour being satisfied, he declined it. He could do better work for his country in London, said he, than in again burying himself alive for an indefinite number of years in China. The Foreign Office regretted his decision; but it gave him to understand that the offer would always remain open. They parted on terms of the most cordial politeness; but if the Foreign Office had heard the things Baltazar said of it, its upstanding hair would have raised its own roof off. “Three months,” he cried to Marcelle, “playing the fool, wasting their time and mine, when the whole thing could have been done in five minutes.” “But I can’t quite see,” she objected, “why you went on when you had made up your mind from the start not to go back to China.” “Can’t you?” said he. “I’ll explain. I’ve sworn that there’ll be no more idiocy on the part of John Baltazar to prevent him coming into his own. He is coming into it. That the F.O. should recognize his position was an essential factor of his own. When a man can dictate terms, he has established himself. See? I suppose,” said he, halting in his abrupt way, and thrusting his hands deep in his trousers pockets, “you think this is just childish vanity. Come, say it.” She met his bright eyes and smiled up at him. “If I do, you won’t bite my head off?” “No. I’ll convince you that it isn’t. Vanity, as its name implies, is emptiness. Negative. This isn’t vanity, it’s Pride. Something positive. My pet Deadly Sin. If you’ve got that strong, you can tell the six others to go back to hell. If I hadn’t got it, the others would have torn me to bits long ago. If I were a mongrel and thought myself a prize bull-pup—that would be vanity. But I know, hang it all, that I’m a prize bull-pup, and when I take leave to remind myself, and people like the F.O. of the fact, that’s Pride. And when I say I’ve sworn to fulfil the Destiny of the prize pup, John Baltazar, and be one of the intellectual forces that’ll carry the Empire along to Victory—that’s not vanity. Where’s the emptiness? It’s Pride—reckoned first of the Seven Deadly Sins. If I glory in it—well—according to the Theologians, it’s my damnation: according to me, it’s the other way about. Look. There’s another way of putting it——” Suddenly she was smitten with the memory of Godfrey’s words five or six months ago, when he fumed at the bear-leading of Quong Ho—“Those infernal dancing eyes of his—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing.” The boy was right. She met just that pathetic appeal. He was so anxious to put himself right with her. He went on: