You want to find yourself on the same plane with her; you want to be socially her equal; and to do that you think you should throw off those theatrical trappings.  You see, my dear Linn, if I have remembered my catechism, you have not; you have forgotten that you must learn and labor truly to get your own living, and do your duty in that state of life unto which it has pleased God to call you.  You want to change your state of life; you want to become a barrister.  What would happen?  The chances are entirely against your being able to earn your own living—­at least for years; but what is far more certain is that your fashionable friends—­whose positions and occupations you admire—­would care nothing more about you.  You are interesting to them now because you are a favorite of the public, because you play the chief part at the New Theatre.  What would you be as a briefless barrister?  Who would provide you with salmon-fishing and deer-stalking then?  If you aspired to marry one of those dames of high degree, what would be your claims and qualifications?  You say you would almost rather be a gillie in charge of dogs and ponies.  A gillie in charge of dogs and ponies doesn’t enjoy many conversations with his young mistress; and if he made bold to demand any closer alliance Pauline would pretty soon have that Claude kicked off the premises—­and serve him right.  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.  Of course you won’t do it.  You couldn’t bring yourself to become a mere nobody—­as would happen if you went into chambers and began reading up law-books.  And you wouldn’t be any nearer to salmon-fishing and deer-forests that way, or to the people who possess these by birth and inheritance.  The trouble with you, Linn, my boy, as with most of us, is that you weren’t born in the purple.  It is quite true that if you were called to the bar