s a
gigantic brotherhood in the world, a brotherhood of those who have never
willingly done a day's work in their lives and never intend to. We have
been so mesmerized by the phrase the Idle Rich, that we have completely
forgotten that sinister and perilous pestilence, the Idle Poor. Looking
at M. Nikitos, with his hair standing straight up on the lower slopes of
his head like fir trees on the sides of a mountain and his opaque black
eyes staring with fanatical intensity at nothing in particular, one was
irresistibly reminded of a fungus. The incipient black beard, which was
making its appearance in patches on his chin and jaws, lent a certain
strength to the impression of fungoid growth, and encouraged a dreadful
sort of notion that he was beyond the normal and lovable passions of
men. He was, you will remember, a pure man. He sat there, raising that
horrible silk hat, exposing, with the mechanical regularity of an
automaton his extraordinary frontal configuration, the apotheosis of
undesirable chastity. And he had formed a resolution 'which nothing
could kill.' I don't doubt it. The resolutions of an individual like
that are as substantial and indestructible as he. They persist, in
obedience to a melancholy law of human development, from one generation
to another. They are as numerously busy just now, under the 'drums and
tramplings' of the conflict, as maggots in a cheese. They have the
elusive and impersonal mobility of a cloud of poisonous gases. They
restore one's belief in a principle of evil, and they may scare us,
ultimately, back from their wonderful Liberty and Progress, into an
authentic faith in God.

"And I also," resumed Mr. Spenlove, after a moment's silence, "formed a
resolution, to refrain from any further participation in alien affairs.
I found that I lacked courage for that enterprise, too. It is, after
all, a dangerous thing to tamper with one's fundamental prejudices. They
very often turn out to be the stark and ugly supports of our health and
sanity. I resigned, not without a faint but undeniable tremor of relief,
the part of a principal in the play. I have harped to you on this point
of my relative importance in the story because it was as a mere super
that I entered from the wings and it is as a super in the last act that
I retire. I think it was the letter and package M. Kinaitsky sent down
to the ship which scared me into obscurity. That and the news that the
four o'clock express for Constanti