Here old Sax got excited again. He looked at both of us, as if he thought that we doubted him. "I tell you again," he said, "that that other woman was nothing to me at all, except a poor pitiful creature that I would have been a brute not to help. I am speaking honestly as a man to his two friends--" "Arthur," said Perez, "to me you need never justify, need never explain; if you say so, that is all, the rest is wasted time." "Here, too," says I. It would stagger anybody to see how poor Saxton wanted us to believe him. I began to see how he had poisoned his life. He looked at us very thankfully, but tears came into his eyes. He tried to go on in the calm way, but his throat was husky. Then he swore out free and felt better. "To save time, I believe you in turn," he said. "Another of my tricks is to wish to be believed in myself, and yet always doubt other people. Well, I lost my grip; I cannot remember all I said to Mary, but I can easily remember that it was all unpleasant. I simply improved on the Almighty's handiwork by making a longer-eared jackass of myself than I was intended to be, winding up as a masterstroke by attacking Belknap. It was only two days before, Perez, that Oriñez had told me the other side of Belknap's Great Work; of how he was undoing all that you and Oriñez had done for the salvation of this unlucky country, by starting up a revolution in order that a lot of poor devils might be killed for his private benefit. I laid it on hard in my fury, and Mary told me to leave. She said she didn't want to be a witness of my descending so low as to attack an honorable man behind his back,--and then I came away. The Lord knows I have no memory of that walk home; everything that was bad in my blood came out. Honest, I fought--that is to say, I had lucid intervals of an hour or so, but every day my sense wore blunt under the grind of despair. It was a disease; it would come on me in waves like an ague fit. I really suffered physically; I lost every bit of decency that ever was in me; I became a God-forsaken, devil-ridden brute; a quart of French brandy a day did me no especial good, and yet I loved the stuff for the time. Well, the disease, like any disease, had to reach its climax. It came when I started to strike you, Henry--that was the limit of meanness for any living man. Then old Bill here took hold of me, and squeezed what was left of the obsession out of me with the first hug of his arms. For the expulsion of devils, I recommend your long flippers, Bill, my boy.... "I am not going to apologize to you, Henry, nor to Bill. If I didn't feel something more than any apology could make good, I wouldn't be worth your trouble. But right here I shift." We sat still. Seldom you see a man take out his soul: when that happens, it is usually a kind of indecent exposure. A man must shake every glimmer of vanity out.