t.

NAPOLEON. Need that stop you?

LADY. Well, it is this. I adore a man who is not afraid to be mean and
selfish.

NAPOLEON (indignantly). I am neither mean nor selfish.

LADY. Oh, you don't appreciate yourself. Besides, I don't really mean
meanness and selfishness.

NAPOLEON. Thank you. I thought perhaps you did.

LADY. Well, of course I do. But what I mean is a certain strong
simplicity about you.

NAPOLEON. That's better.

LADY. You didn't want to read the letters; but you were curious about
what was in them. So you went into the garden and read them when no one
was looking, and then came back and pretended you hadn't. That's the
meanest thing I ever knew any man do; but it exactly fulfilled your
purpose; and so you weren't a bit afraid or ashamed to do it.

NAPOLEON (abruptly). Where did you pick up all these vulgar
scruples--this (with contemptuous emphasis) conscience of yours? I took
you for a lady--an aristocrat. Was your grandfather a shopkeeper, pray?

LADY. No: he was an Englishman.

NAPOLEON. That accounts for it. The English are a nation of
shopkeepers. Now I understand why you've beaten me.

LADY. Oh, I haven't beaten you. And I'm not English.

NAPOLEON. Yes, you are--English to the backbone. Listen to me: I will
explain the English to you.

LADY (eagerly). Do. (With a lively air of anticipating an intellectual
treat, she sits down on the couch and composes herself to listen to
him. Secure of his audience, he at once nerves himself for a
performance. He considers a little before he begins; so as to fix her
attention by a moment of suspense. His style is at first modelled on
Talma's in Corneille's "Cinna;" but it is somewhat lost in the
darkness, and Talma presently gives way to Napoleon, the voice coming
through the gloom with startling intensity.)

NAPOLEON. There are three sorts of people in the world, the low people,
the middle people, and the high people. The low people and the high
people are alike in one thing: they have no scruples, no morality. The
low are beneath morality, the high above it. I am not afraid of either
of them: for the low are unscrupulous without knowledge, so that they
make an idol of me; whilst the high are unscrupulous without purpose,
so that they go down before my will. Look you: I shall go over all the
mobs and all the courts of Europe as a plough goes over a field. It is
the middle people who are dangerous: they have both knowledge and
purpose. But they,