“For many years now I have been dead to my sister’s knowledge, for brutalized and sordid as I have grown, she was the one thing in the world besides myself I have ever been able to pity. Even when I descended below my poor father’s level, I could never find it in my heart to ‘queer her pitch’ as we say in the gutter. She grew happy and prosperous, and forgot her childhood and all the sores that festered upon her name. Long ago she achieved the beatitude of that condition of mental and moral nullity as predicted by her distinguished parent; while I, as also predicted by that seer, was destined for sterner things. “In those lucid intervals when drugs and drams had left me the use of my faculties, I sought to appease my cynicism by preying upon society. I cannot reveal to you the cold rage I nourished against the cosmogony that had been evolved by I know not how many generations of Pharisees. The lode-star of my father’s ambition was art for the sake of art; that of her he had nurtured upon it became crime for the sake of crime. Not that I was wanton or petty in the workings of my creed; like my father, I had usually some large aim in view. Yet again like my father, it was not to myself that material prosperity accrued from the exercise of my gift, but to the crimps and bullies by whom I was surrounded. It was one of these, a base, cold-blooded, brutal, calculating ruffian, whom so treacherously I did to death. “I think I should enact that crime again; although when my guilt was fastened upon me, and I was brought into prison, my fear of the gallows was terrible. It was even stronger than my poor father’s dread of criticism of his works. And yet as I lay under the shadow of a fate that I did not know how to obtain the fortitude to accept, I amused myself with a stroke of that wantonness which has sometimes delighted my associates, and on occasions has even rendered them respectful. I chose Mr. Whitcomb to undertake my defence. My poverty and evil repute made him reluctant to accept the office, but like my father, I retain a little of the artist’s power of seeing into the future. In my dreams a voice whispered to me that he alone could ensure my safety. And to my importunity he yielded. He yielded to that importunity which when I have felt called upon to exert it, no man has ever been able to resist. “What a sanctuary did this prison with its indescribable gloom offer to me! All the days of my life had been cast with drunkards, madmen, thieves, panders, and prostitutes. They had rendered the very breath of heaven unclean. From one slum to another slum, from one gutter to another gutter had my steps been traced. Will it astonish you that what after all was a powerful nature had founded its grand passion upon an irreconcilable hatred of its kind? Yet I was brought into prison, and for the first time I tasted the breath of the living God.