“‘Well, you see, it’s this way,’ she went on, ‘it’s my beauty. All you men are alike you see: you can’t stand it. You would be just the same as the rest. You would be wanting to flirt with me, too, and it wouldn’t be your fault, but mine. You can’t help it. I know that now. But I don’t want you to be following me like the rest of them, and you would be if I looked at you as I do at the others.’ She had on at the time a large hat, which evidently she had been trying on before I came, and now she pulled it most coquettishly low over her face and then sidled, laughingly, out of the room. “When I saw and heard this,” he went on, “I was deeply moved instead of being amused as some might imagine, for I recognized that this was an instance of one of those kindly compensations in nature about which I have been talking, some deep inherent wish on the part of some overruling Providence perhaps to make life more reasonably endurable for all of us. Here was this girl, sensitive and seeking, who had been denied everything—or, rather, the one thing she most craved in life; love. For years she had been compelled to sit by and see others have all the attention and pleasures, while she had nothing—no pleasures, no lovers. And because she had been denied them their import had been exaggerated by her; their color and splendor intensified. She had been crucified, after a fashion, until beauty and attention were all that her mind cried for. And then, behold the mercy of the forces about which we are talking! They diverted her mind in order to save her from herself. They appeared at last to preserve her from complete immolation, or so I see it. Life does not wish to crucify people, of that I am sure. It lives on itself—as we see,—is “red of beak and claw” as the phrase has it—and yet, in the deep, who knows there may be some satisfactory explanation for that too—who can tell? At any rate, as I see it basically, fundamentally, it is well-intentioned. Useless, pointless torture had no real place in it; or at least so I think.” He paused and stared, as though he had clinched his argument. “Just the same, as you say,” I insisted, “it does live on itself, the slaughter houses, the stockyards, the butcher shops, the germs that live and fatten as people die. If you can get much comfort out of these you are welcome.” He paid no attention to me. Instead, he went on: “This is only a theory of mine, but we know, for instance, that there is no such thing as absolute evil, any more than there is absolute good. There is only relative evil and relative good. What is good for or to me may be evil to you, and vice versa, like a man who may be evil to you and good to me.