 never was intoxicated, save with his own vivacity.«
    They discussed the singular being with good-natured mirth, then turned by
degrees to other topics.
    »I have just come across a passage that will delight you,« said Earwaker,
taking up a book. »Perhaps you know it.«
    He read from Sir Thomas Brown's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. »Men's names should
not only distinguish them. A man should be something that all men are not, and
individual in somewhat beside his proper name. Thus, while it exceeds not the
bound of reason and modesty, we cannot condemn singularity. Nos numerus sumus is
the motto of the multitude, and for that reason are they fools.«
    Peak laughed his approval.
    »It astonishes me,« he said, lighting his pipe, »that you can go on writing
for this Sunday rag, when you have just as little sympathy with its aims as I
have. Do get into some less offensive connection.«
    »What paper would you recommend?« asked the other, with his significant
smile.
    »Why need you journalise at all?«
    »On the whole, I like it. And remember, to admit that the multitude are
fools is not the same thing as to deny the possibility of progress.«
    »Do you really believe yourself a democrat, Earwaker?«
    »M-m-m! Well, yes, I believe the democratic spirit is stronger in me than
any other.«
    Peak mused for a minute, then suddenly looked up.
    »And what am I?«
    »I am glad nothing much depends on my successfully defining you.«
    They laughed together.
    »I suppose,« said Godwin, »you can't call a man a democrat who recognises in
his heart and soul a true distinction of social classes. Social, mark. The
division I instinctively support is by no means intellectual. The well-born fool
is very often more sure of my respect than the working man who struggles to a
fair measure of education.«
    Earwaker would have liked to comment on this with remarks personal to the
speaker, but he feared to do so. His silence, however, was eloquent to Peak, who
resumed brusquely.
    »I am not myself well-born, - though if my parents could have come into
wealth early in their lives, perhaps I might reasonably have called myself so.
All sorts of arguments can be brought against my prejudice, but the prejudice is
ineradicable. I respect hereditary social standing, independently of the
individual's qualities. There's
