ugh its paces as a horse-dealer does with a horse; he observes his
action, his strong and weak points, and then forms a business-like
estimate of his worth.

It is the same with his treatment of people. He has a hard and shrewd
judgment of character, and a polite contempt for weakness of every
kind. He is a Radical by conviction, with a strong sense of equal
rights. Socialism he thinks unpractical, and he is interested in
movements rather than in men.

But he seldom or never lets one into his confidence about people. If he
respects and values a man he says so frankly, but keeps silence about
the people of whom he does not approve. On one of the few occasions in
which I had a peep into the interior of his mind, I was surprised to
find that he had a strong class-feeling. He had an obvious contempt for
what may be called the upper class, and gave me to understand that he
thought their sense of superiority a very false one. He thought of them
simply as the people, so to speak, in possession, but entirely lacking
in moral purpose and ideal. I said something about the agreeable,
sympathetic courtesy of well-bred people, and he made it plain that he
regarded it as a sort of expensive and useless product. He had, I
found, a different kind of contempt for the lower classes, regarding
them as thriftless and unenterprising. In fact, the professional middle
class seemed to him to have a monopoly of the virtues--common-sense,
simplicity, respectability.

Two things for which he has no kind of sympathy are art and music,
which appear to him to be a kind of harmless and elegant trifling. I am
afraid that what irritates me in his treatment of these subjects is his
cool and sensible indifference to them. He never expresses the least
opposition to them, but merely treats them as purely negligible things.
He is not exactly complacent, because there is no touch of vanity or
egotism about him; and then his attitude is impossible to assail,
because there is no assumption whatever of superiority about it. He
merely knows that he is right, and he has no interest whatever in
convincing other people; when they know better, when they get rid of
their emotional prejudices, they will feel, he is sure, as he does.

In discussing matters he is not at all a doctrinaire; he deals with any
objections that one makes courteously and frankly, and even covers his
opponent's retreat with a polite quoting of possible precedents.
Without being a well-bred