I meant simply that you both habitually speak the truth, and because you speak the truth the world mistakes you for a successful comedian and Vetch for a kind of political Robin Hood." "Well, he is trying to hold us up in highwayman fashion, isn't he ?" asked Corinna.
"Does it look that way ?" inquired the Judge, with his beaming smile which cast an edge of genial irony on everything that he said.

"On the contrary, it seems to me that Vetch is telling us the things we have known about ourselves for a very long time.

He says the world might be a better place if we would only take the trouble to make it so; if we would only try to live up to our epitaphs, I believe he once remarked.
He says also, I understand, that he is trying to climb to the top over somebody else; and when I say 'he' I mean, of course, his order or his class, whatever the fashionable phrase is.

Now, unfortunately, there appears to be but one way of reaching the top of the world, doesn't there ?--and that is by climbing up on something or somebody.

Even you, my dear Stephen, who occupy that high place, merely inherited the seat from somebody who scrambled up there a few centuries ago.