ritten....

"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your other
guests too much. I've a sort of feeling at moments--Remington, those
chaps are so infernally not--not bloody. It's part of a man's duty
sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to
understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think of your
lot--by a sort of misapprehension--being in power. A kind of neuralgia
in the head, by way of government. I don't understand where YOU come in.
Those others--they've no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I,
we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it.
They--they want to take hold of life and make nothing of it. They want
to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else but
a reaction to stimulation!"...

He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune through most
of it. He was poor and unsuccessful, and a girl he had been very fond
of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible
manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't
broken him. They had, it seemed to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly
demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had
any right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt
look, and it made my reaction all the stronger. There was about him
something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of
life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had
irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his touch how they
irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my
easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his
rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter shape,
and listened to his denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism
and Progressivism.

"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that the
things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and beauty.
There's a sort of filiation.... Your Altiora's just the political
equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's
a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real progress,
Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing
altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed to where under a boarding in the
light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking--"was in Babylon
and Nineveh. Your lit