that you must learn and
labor truly to get your own living, and do your duty in that state of
life unto which it has pleased God to call you. You want to change your
state of life; you want to become a barrister. What would happen? The
chances are entirely against your being able to earn your own living--at
least for years; but what is far more certain is that your fashionable
friends--whose positions and occupations you admire--would care nothing
more about you. You are interesting to them now because you are a
favorite of the public, because you play the chief part at the New
Theatre. What would you be as a briefless barrister? Who would provide
you with salmon-fishing and deer-stalking then? If you aspired to marry
one of those dames of high degree, what would be your claims and
qualifications? You say you would almost rather be a gillie in charge of
dogs and ponies. A gillie in charge of dogs and ponies doesn't enjoy
many conversations with his young mistress; and if he made bold to
demand any closer alliance Pauline would pretty soon have that Claude
kicked off the premises--and serve him right. If you had come to me and
said, 'I am too well off; I am being spoiled and petted to death; the
simplicity and dignity of life is being wholly lost in all this
fashionable flattery, this public notoriety and applause; and to recover
myself a little--as a kind of purification--I am going to put aside my
trappings; I will go and work as a hod-carrier for three months or six
months; I will live on the plainest fare; I will bear patiently the
cursing the master of the gang will undoubtedly hurl at me; I will sleep
on a straw mattress'--then I could have understood that. But what is it
you renounce?--and why? You think you would recommend yourself better to
your swell friends if you dropped the theatre altogether--"

"Don't you want to hire a hall?" said Lionel, gloomily.

"Oh, nobody likes being preached at less than I do myself," Mangan said,
with perfect equanimity, "but you see I think I ought to tell you, when
you ask me, how I regard the situation. And, mind you, there is
something very heroic--very impracticably heroic, but magnanimous all
the same--in your idea that you might abandon all the popularity and
position you have won as a mere matter of sentiment. Of course you won't
do it. You couldn't bring yourself to become a mere nobody--as would
happen if you went into chambers and began reading up law-books. And you
w