the community.
It is rapidly disappearing, which, I daresay, is a fortunate thing."

"Your greater nobility," said Ascher, "is modernised, is necessarily
more or less cosmopolitan. It has international interests and is
occupied with great affairs. It has been forced to accept the standard
of ethics in accordance with which great affairs are managed. Your
merchants and manufacturers have their own code, by no means a low one,
and their theory of right and wrong. Between these two classes come the
men with lesser titles or no titles at all, families which spring from
roots centuries deep in the soil of England, men of some wealth, but
not of great riches. They have their own standard, their code, their
peculiar touchstone for distinguishing fine conduct from its imitation,
their ethic."

"Yes," I said, "I can understand your being interested in that. It is a
survival of a certain antiquarian value. It is the quaintest standard
of conduct imaginable, totally unreasonable and inconsistent. But it
exists. There are some things which a gentleman of that class will not
do."

"Exactly. These men--may I say you, for it is you I am thinking of. You
have your sense of honour."

I never was more surprised in my life than I was when Ascher said
that to me. Nothing that I have ever said or done in his company could
possibly have led him to suppose that I am a victim of that outworn
superstition known as the honour of a gentleman.

"You have an instinct," said Ascher, "inherited through many
generations, a highly specialised sense, now nearly infallible, for
knowing what is honourable and what is base. I do not know that any
of my countrymen have that sense. I am sure that the class to which I
belong has not. We look at things in a different way."

"A much better way," I said, "more practical."

"Yes, more practical. Better perhaps in the sense of being wiser. But I
have a wish, an odd fancy if you like, to see things your way, to guide
my conduct according to your standard of honour."

As well as I could make out Ascher was asking me to decide for him on
which horn of his infernal dilemma he was to impale himself, and to
base my decision on a perfectly absurd and arbitrary set of rules for
conduct, none of which could by any possibility be made to apply to a
situation like his.

"My dear Ascher," I said, "I can't possibly judge for you."

"You could judge if it were your own case," he said. "You could
certainly judge th