Every man is characterized by the way he behaves in regard to his promises. I do not mean keeping or breaking a promise, because nobody doubts that the honest man keeps it and the scoundrel does not. I mean the _manner_ in which a promise is kept and the _degree_ in which it is kept. La Roche-Foucauld[84] says significantly: “We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.” When in any given case promising and hopes and performance and fears are compared, important considerations arise,--especially in cases of complicity in crime. When it is at all possible, and in most cases it is, one ought to concern oneself with a man’s style,--the handwriting of his soul. What this consists of cannot be expressed in a definite way. The style must simply be studied and tested with regard to its capacity for being united with certain presupposed qualities. Everybody knows that education, bringing-up, and intelligence are indubitably expressed in style, but it may also be observed that style clearly expresses softness or hardness of a character, kindness or cruelty, determination or weakness, integrity or carelessness, and hundreds of other qualities. Generally the purpose of studying style may be achieved by keeping in mind some definite quality presupposed and by asking oneself, while reading the manuscript of the person in question, whether this quality fuses with the manuscript’s form and with the individual tendencies and relationships that occur in the construction of the thought. One reading will of course not bring you far, but if the reading is repeated and taken up anew, especially as often as the writer is met with or as often as some new fact about him is established, then it is almost impossible not to attain a fixed and valuable result. One gets then significantly the sudden impression that the thing to be proved, having the expression of which the properties are to be established, rises out of the manuscript; and when that happens the time has come not to dawdle with the work. Repeated reading causes the picture above-mentioned to come out more clearly and sharply; it is soon seen in what places or directions of the manuscript that expression comes to light--these places are grouped together, others are sought that more or less imply it, and soon a standpoint for further consideration is reached which naturally is not evidential by itself, but has, when combined with numberless others, corroborative value.