am training myself. I want to
create all my ideas, habits, prejudices, with a view to the role I am
going to play."

"You do not know what Spain is like," said Laura. "Life is very hard
here."

"I know that well. There is no social system here, there is nothing
established; therefore it is easier to create one for oneself."

"Yes, but some protection is requisite."

"Oh, I will find that."

"Where?"

"I think those Church people we knew in Rome will do for me."

"But you are not a Clerical."

"No." "And do you want to start your career by deceiving people?"

"I cannot choose my means. Politics are like this: doing something with
nothing, doing a great deal with a little, erecting a castle on a grain
of sand."

"And do you, who have so many moral prejudices, wish to begin in that
way?"

"Who told you that accepting every means is not moral?"

"I don't understand how it could be," replied Laura.

"I do," answered her brother. "What is individual morality today? Almost
nothing. It almost doesn't exist. Individual morality can come to be
collective only by contagion, by enthusiasm. And such things do not
happen nowadays; every one has his own morality; but we have not arrived
at a scientific moral code. Years ago notable men accepted the moral
code of the categoric imperative, in lieu of the moral code based on
sin; but the categorical imperative is a stoical morality, a wise man's
morality which has not the sentimental value necessary to make it
popular."

"I do not understand these things," she replied, displeased.

"The doctor understands me, don't you?" he said.

"Yes, I believe I do."

"For me," Caesar went on, "individual morality consists in adapting
one's life to a thought, to a preconceived plan. The man who proposes to
be a scientist and puts all his powers into achieving that, is a moral
man, even though he steals and is a blackguard in other things."

"Then, for you," I argued, "morality is might, tenacity; immorality is
weakness, cowardice."

"Yes, it comes to that. The man capable of feeling himself the
instrument of an idea always seems to me moral. Bismarck, for instance,
was a moral man."

"It is a forceful point of view," said I.

"Which, as I see, you do not share," he exclaimed.

"As things are today, no. For me the idea of morality is attached to the
idea of pity rather than to the idea of force; but I comprehend that
pity is destructive."

"I believe that you and Caesar,