st it,' said Charles Lamb, 'I never can
hate anyone that I know!' The best bred man is the man who finds it easy to
get on with everybody on equal terms: but it's part of the snobbishness of
human nature that exclusiveness is rather admired than otherwise. There's a
delightfully exclusive woman in one of Henry James' novels, who refuses to
be introduced to a family. She entirely declines, and the man who is
anxious to effect the introduction says, 'I can't think why you object to
them.' 'They are hopelessly vulgar,' says the incisive lady, 'and in this
short life, that is enough!' But St. Paul's remark is really very good,
because it means 'Treat everyone with courtesy--but reserve your fine
affections for the inner circle, whose worth you really know!'--it's a
better theory than that of the man who said, 'It is enough for me to be
with those whom I love!' That's rather inhuman."

"Do you remember," said Barthrop, "the lines in Tennyson's Guinevere, which
sum up the knightly attributes?

"'High thought, and amiable words,
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.'"

"That's very interesting and curious!" said Father Payne. "Dear me, I had
forgotten that--did Tennyson say that?--Come--let's have it again!"

Barthrop repeated the lines again.

"Now, that's the gentlemanly ideal of the sixties," said Father Payne,
"and, good heavens, how offensive it sounds! The most curious part of it
really is 'the desire of fame'--of course, a hundred years ago, no one made
any secret of that! You remember Nelson's frank confession, made not once,
but many times, that he pursued glory, 'Defeat--or Westminster
Abbey'--didn't he say that?"

"But surely people pursue fame as much as ever?" said Vincent.

"I daresay," said Father Payne, "but it isn't now considered good taste to
say so. You have got to pretend, at all events, that you wish to benefit
humanity now-a-days. If a man had said to Ruskin or Carlyle, 'Why do you
write all these books?' and they replied, 'It is because of my desire for
fame,' it would have been thought vulgar. There's that odd story of Robert
Browning, when he received an ovation at Oxford, and someone said to him,
'I suppose you don't care about all this,' he said, 'It is what I have
waited for all my life!' I wonder if he _did_ say it! I think he must
have done, because it is exactly the sort of thing that one is supposed not
to say--and I confess I don't l