--that's
conduct, that's life."

"And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?"

"In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one's out of it--the
question doesn't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others.
The brute, the ass," Nick's visitor developed, "neither feels nor
understands, nor accepts nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves
classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that to profit
by them we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognise our
particular form, the instrument that each of us--each of us who carries
anything--carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to
play it in perfection--that's what I call duty, what I call conduct,
what I call success."

Nick listened with friendly attention and the air of general assent was
in his face as he said: "Every one has it then, this individual pipe?"

"'Every one,' my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world's full
of the crudest _remplissage_. The book of life's padded, ah but
padded--a deplorable want of editing! I speak of every one who's any
one. Of course there are pipes and pipes--little quavering flutes for
the concerted movements and big _cornets-a-piston_ for the great solos."

"I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?"

Nash hesitated not a moment; his answer was radiantly there. "To speak
to people just as I'm speaking to you. To prevent for instance a great
wrong being done."

"A great wrong--?"

"Yes--to the human race. I talk--I talk; I say the things other people
don't, the things they can't the things they won't," Gabriel went on
with his inimitable candour.

"If it's a question of mastery and perfection you certainly have them,"
his companion replied.

"And you haven't, alas; that's the pity of it, that's the scandal.
That's the wrong I want to set right before it becomes too public a
shame. If I called you just now grossly immoral it's on account of the
spectacle you present--a spectacle to be hidden from the eye of
ingenuous youth: that of a man neglecting his own fiddle to blunder away
on that of one of his fellows. We can't afford such mistakes, we can't
tolerate such licence."

"You think then I _have_ a fiddle?"--and our young man, in spite of
himself, attached to the question a quaver of suspense finer, doubtless,
than any that had ever passed his lips.

"A regular Stradivarius! All these things you've shown me are remarkably
interestin