'That's one of the uses of coming here to Herr Schurz's,' Ernest
answered quickly. 'You may not agree with all you hear, but at
least you learn to see others as they see themselves; whereas if
you mix always in English society, and read only English papers,
you will see them only as we English see them.'

'But just fancy,' Oswald went on, as they both stood back a little
to make way for others who wished for interviews with the great
man, 'just fancy that this Borodinsky, or whatever his name may be,
has himself very likely helped in dynamite plots, or manufactured
nitro-glycerine cartridges to blow up the Czar; and yet we stand
here talking with him as coolly as if he were an ordinary respectable
innocent Englishman.'

'What of that?' Ernest answered, smiling. 'Didn't we meet Prince
Strelinoffsky at Oriel last term, and didn't we talk with him too,
as if he was an honest, hard-working, bread-earning Christian? and
yet we knew he was a member of the St. Petersburg office clique,
and at the bottom of half the trouble in Poland for the last ten
years or so. Grant even that Borodinsky is quite wrong in his way
of dealing with noxious autocrats, and yet which do you think is
the worst criminal of the two--he with his little honest glazier's
shop in a back slum of Paddington, or Strelinoffsky with his jewelled
fingers calmly signing accursed warrants to send childing Polish
women to die of cold and hunger and ill-treatment on the way to
Siberia?'

'Well, really, Le Breton, you know I'm a passably good Radical,
but you're positively just one stage too Radical even for me.'