Rogue Male

by Geoffrey Household

Their tiresome conception of the State has one comforting effect; it creates so many moral lepers that no one of them, if he has a little patience, can long be lonely. The flotsam of the nation is washed together into an unrecognized, nameless, formless secret society.

for no man was ever born who could not feel some shade of hope if he were in open country with the sun about to rise.

There must be a special virtue in sweat, cooling one spiritually as well as physically.

A people, my dear fellow, of quite extraordinary stupidity and immorality. A very rare combination which only a long experience of democratic government could have produced.

He hated us like hell, considered us (he said it himself) as the Goths must have considered the Roman Empire, a corrupt bunch of moralizing luxury-lovers who could only hold their frontiers by exploiting—and that inefficiently—the enormous wealth and the suffering millions behind them.