oted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.

"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."

We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity," he
admitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decency
until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to
speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look
a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our
coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions,
a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed
to seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slide
of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.
I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out
into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools,
not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take
the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit,
sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to
know what I'm doing."

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one
is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does
the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far
I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty
certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call
aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was
developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the
proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts
of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to
other people's.

"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones;
"that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between
fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything.
And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's
saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that
is."

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.

"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are we
up he