“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me--I dare say there were many struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea for the exercise of clemency. “Come--were there not?--I dare say there were--circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?” “Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.” “Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?” And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?” “Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.” “He lived?--and you were sorry that he lived?” “No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was glad he lived.” “And yet you hated him?” “I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another.” “And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief----” “Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.” “My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!” Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death, was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would. But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My doubts as to her sanity returned. “Still,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “if I killed a man, I should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death.”