Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/53

 desire to put forward a lot of people whom you regard, almost without exception, as donkeys.'

'Ah, my dear lad.' laughed Muniment, 'when one undertakes to meddle in human affairs one must deal with human material. The upper classes have the longest ears.'

'I have heard you say that you were working for an equality in human conditions, to abolish the immemorial inequality. What you want, then, for all mankind is a similar nuance of asininity.'

'That's very clever; did you pick it up in France? The low tone of our fellow-mortals is a result of bad conditions; it is the conditions I want to alter. When those that have no start to speak of have a good one, it is but fair to infer that they will go further. I want to try them, you know.'

'But why equality?' Hyacinth asked. 'Somehow, that word doesn't say so much to me as it used to. Inequality—inequality! I don't know whether it's by dint of repeating it over to myself, but that doesn't shock me as it used.'

'They didn't put you up to that in France, I'm sure!' Muniment exclaimed. 'Your point of view has changed; you have risen in the world.'

'Risen? Good God, what have I risen to?'

'True enough; you were always a bloated little swell!' And Muniment gave his young friend a sociable slap on the back. There was a momentary bitterness in its being imputed to such a one as Hyacinth, even in joke, that he had taken sides with the fortunate ones of the earth, and he had it on his tongue's end to ask his friend if he had never guessed what his proud titles were—the bastard of a murderess, spawned in a gutter, out of which he had been