If you had come to me and
said, 'I am too well off; I am being spoiled and petted to death; the
simplicity and dignity of life is being wholly lost in all this
fashionable flattery, this public notoriety and applause; and to recover
myself a little--as a kind of purification--I am going to put aside my
trappings; I will go and work as a hod-carrier for three months or six
months; I will live on the plainest fare; I will bear patiently the
cursing the master of the gang will undoubtedly hurl at me; I will sleep
on a straw mattress'--then I could have understood that. But what is it
you renounce?--and why? You think you would recommend yourself better to
your swell friends if you dropped the theatre altogether--"
"Don't you want to hire a hall?" said Lionel, gloomily.
"Oh, nobody likes being preached at less than I do myself," Mangan said,
with perfect equanimity, "but you see I think I ought to tell you, when
you ask me, how I regard the situation. And, mind you, there is
something very heroic--very impracticably heroic, but magnanimous all
the same--in your idea that you might abandon all the popularity and
position you have won as a mere matter of sentiment.
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