Beware, then,
of the really well-bred and apologetic gentleman whose clothes are at
once quiet and fashionable, whose manner is at once diffident and frank.
Beware how you admit him into your domestic secrets, for he may be a
bogus Earl. Or, worse still, a real one.
THE BOY
I have no sympathy with international aggression when it is taken
seriously, but I have a certain dark and wild sympathy with it when it
is quite absurd. Raids are all wrong as practical politics, but they are
human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition--that it is
of no use at all to anybody. If the aggressor gets anything out of it,
then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of utility
or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does not
steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend's hat; but he does not annex
his friend's hat. For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out
somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after
their immense raids--the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of
Napoleon; "they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an
epic.
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