iliar to these grooms as if they had
dwelt with him. As for the courtiers and barons, there was not one whose
vices and secret crimes were not perfectly well known to them. Vice and
crime must have their instruments; instruments are invariably
indiscreet, and thus secrets escape. The palace intrigues, the intrigues
with other states, the influence of certain women, there was nothing
which they did not know.

Seen thus from below, the whole society appeared rotten and corrupted,
coarse to the last degree, and animated only by the lowest motives. This
very gossip seemed in itself criminal to Felix, but he did not at the
moment reflect that it was but the tale of servants. Had such language
been used by gentlemen, then it would have been treason. As himself of
noble birth, Felix had hitherto seen things only from the point of view
of his own class. Now he associated with grooms, he began to see society
from _their_ point of view, and recognised how feebly it was held
together by brute force, intrigue, cord and axe, and woman's flattery.
But a push seemed needed to overthrow it. Yet it was quite secure,
nevertheless, as there was none to give that push, and if any such plot
had been formed, those very slaves who suffered the most would have been
the very men to give information, and to torture the plotters.

Felix had never dreamed that common and illiterate men, such as these
grooms and retainers, could have any conception of reasons of State, or
the crafty designs of courts. He now found that, though they could
neither writer nor read, they had learned the art of reading man (the
worst and lowest side of character) to such perfection that they at once
detected the motive. They read the face; the very gait and gesture gave
them a clue. They read man, in fact, as an animal. They understood men
just as they understood the horses and hounds under their charge. Every
mood and vicious indication in those animals was known to them, and so,
too, with their masters.

Felix thought that he was himself a hunter, and understood woodcraft; he
now found how mistaken he had been. He had acquired woodcraft as a
gentleman; he now learned the knave's woodcraft. They taught him a
hundred tricks of which he had had no idea. They stripped man of his
dignity, and nature of her refinement. Everything had a blackguard side
to them. He began to understand that high principles and abstract
theories were only words with the mass of men.

One da