"Wicked injustice and a lost birthright.... Oh, memory was there to crucify me, by day and by night. And yet.... Why, it was a thing that is done every day by men these people say their prayers to.... Oh, yes--I wanted to punish--_him_ for his smug condescension, his patronizing playing of the good Samaritan. And through him all these others ... show them that their old idol wore claws on those feet of clay. But not in that way. No, a much cleverer way than that. Perhaps there would be no money when they asked for it, but I was to smile blandly and go on about my business. They were never to reach _me_. But the Surfaces were never skilled at juggling dirty money.... "They took me off my guard. The most technical fault--a trifle.... Another day or two and everything would have been all right. They had my word for it--and you know how they replied.... The infamous tyranny of the majority. The greatest judicial crime in a decade, and they laughed. "So now I lie awake in the long nights with nine years of _that_ to look back on. "Let my life be a lesson to you teaching you--if nothing else--that it is of no use to fight society. They have a hopeless advantage, the contemptible advantage of numbers, and they are not ashamed to use it.... But my spirit would not let me lie quiet under injury and insult. I was ever a fighter, born to die with my spurs on. And when I die at last, they will find that I go with a Parthian shot ... and after all have the last word. "So I came out into a bright world again, an old man before my time, ruined forever, marked with a scarlet mark to wear to my grave.... "And then in time, as of course it would, the resolve came to me to come straight back here to die. A man wants to die among his own people. They were all that ever meant anything to me--they have that to boast of.... I loved this city once. To die anywhere else ... why, it was meaningless, a burlesque on death. I looked at my face in the glass; my own mother would not have known me. And so I came straight to Jennie Paynter's, such was my whim ... whom I held on my knee fifty years ago. "... Oh, it's been funny ... so funny ... to sit at that intolerable table, and hear poor old Brooke on Reconstruction. "And I've wondered what little Jennie Paynter would do, if I had risen on one of these occasions and spoken my name to the table. How I've hated her--hated the look and sight of her--and all the while embracing it for dear life. She has told me much that she never knew I listened to--many a bit about old friends ... forty years since I'd heard their names. And Brooke has told me much, the doting old ass. "But the life grew unbearable to a man of my temper. I could afford the decency of privacy in my old age. For I had worked hard and saved since.... "And then you came ... a scholar and a gentleman." It was quite dark in the room. Surface's voice had suddenly changed. The bitterness faded out of it; it became gentler than Queed had ever heard it.