it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a
little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is
a long, long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for
mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us.
There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and
trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy....
I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it...."

He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
enthusiasm. "I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something
clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of
personal relationship could possibly be...."

And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with
the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. "I will
tell you what I believe."

He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers
his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be
loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be
lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the
repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had
come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little
warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship
ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth
and all sane loyalty. "There," he said, "is the link of our order, the
new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.
There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all
mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know
that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be
a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I
have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose,
though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have
away there in Lon