of a man's duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk.
How is he to understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to
think of your lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A
kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don't
understand where YOU come in. Those others--they've no lusts.
Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at least a lust to take
hold of life and make something of it. They--they want to take hold
of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the
stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to
stimulation!" . . .

He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through
most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been
very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a
very horrible manner. These things had wounded and tortured him,
but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind
of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive,
so much better than I had any right to expect. At first I had been
rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the
stronger. There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding
faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me profoundly as he
showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him.
I discovered at his touch how they irritated him. He reproached me
boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences as I
walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his
rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his
denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and
Progressivism.

"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that