progress can be, and is, accelerated by the
hypocrisies and snobbishness, all the minor, unpleasant adjuncts of
mediocrity. Snobbishness is a puling infant, but it may grow to a
deeply whiskered ambition, and most virtues are, on examination, the
amalgam of many vices. But while intellectual poverty may be forgiven
and loved, social inequality can only be utilized. Our fellows,
however addled, are our friends, our inferiors are our prey, and since
the policeman had discovered Mary publicly washing out an alien hall
his respect for her had withered and dropped to death almost in an
instant; whence it appears that there is really only one grave and
debasing vice in the world, and that is poverty.

In many little ways the distinction and the difference was apparent to
Mary. The dignity of a gentleman and a man of the world was partly
shorn away: the gentleman portion, which comprised kindness and
reticence, had vanished, the man of the world remained, typified by a
familiarity which assumed that this and that, understood but not to be
mentioned, shall be taken for granted: a spurious equalization perched
jauntily but insecurely on a non-committal, and that base flattery
which is the only coin wherewith a thief can balance his depredations.
For as they went pacing down a lonely road towards the Dodder the
policeman diversified his entertaining lore by a succession of
compliments which ravaged the heavens and the earth and the deep sea
for a fitting symbology. Mary's eyes and the gay heavens were placed
in juxtaposition and the heavens were censured, the vegetable, animal
and mineral worlds were discomfited, the deep sea sustained a reproof
and the by-products of nature and of art drooped into a nothingness
too vast even for laughter. Mary had not the slightest objection to
hearing that all the other women in the world seemed cripples and
gargoyles when viewed against her own transcendent splendor, and she
was prepared to love the person who said this innocently and happily.
She would have agreed to be an angel or a queen to a man demanding
potentates and powers in his sweetheart, and would joyfully have
equalized matters by discovering the buried god in her lover and
believing in it as sincerely as he permitted.--But this man was not
saying the truth. She could see him making the things up as he talked.
There was eagerness in him, but no spontaneity. It was not even
eagerness, it was greediness: he wanted to eat her up and