Both young men paused for a moment. They made no demonstrations.
But the strain was at an end between them.

"I've thought it all out," Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy.
"We two are both of the same kind of men. Only you see, Benham, you
have a natural pride and I haven't. You have pride. But we are
both intellectuals. We both belong to what the Russians call the
Intelligentsia. We have ideas, we have imagination, that is our
strength. And that is our weakness. That makes us moral light-
weights. We are flimsy and uncertain people. All intellectuals are
flimsy and uncertain people. It's not only that they are critical
and fastidious; they are weak-handed. They look about them; their
attention wanders. Unless they have got a habit of controlling
themselves and forcing themselves and holding themselves together."

"The habit of pride."

"Yes. And then--then we are lords of the world."

"All this, Billy," said Benham, "I steadfastly believe."

"I've seen it all now," said Prothero. "Lord! how clearly I see it!
The intellectual is either a prince or he is a Greek slave in a
Roman household. He's got to hold his chin up or else he becomes--
even as these dons we see about us--a thing that talks appointments,
a toady, a port-wine bibber, a mass of detail, a conscious maker of
neat sayings, a growing belly under a dwindling brain. Their
gladness is drink or gratified vanity or gratified malice, their
sorrow is indigestion or--old maid's melancholy. They are the lords
of the world who will not take the sceptre. . . . And what I want