"Ah," said Nicholson, "there you touch a vexed problem, because there you have to do with a corporation, and it is almost a fact that corporations have no souls." "If that corporation ever had any, it is damned," said Luke; "but what I’m driving at is that the individuals composing a corporation have moral responsibilities." The clergyman agreed, but in corporations, he thought, responsibility was so intricately subdivided and so sinuously delegated that no one man had much left to him or could incur much guilt for his individual errors. In connection with most such accidents as a railway wreck, there was really an ethical basis for the legal phrase "an act of God." "Not in the North Bridge wreck," said Luke. "It’s been shown that the company used cheap material, didn’t have any proper system for checking its work-reports so as to tell whether ordered repairs were made, and didn’t hire competent men. The company can’t get out of this mess by saying its experts were forced on it by the unions: it hasn’t any legal right to delegate its choice of experts to a union. It’s a common carrier and, if it can’t do its work properly, then it ought to stop work." Nicholson saw this much as Luke did, and said so at a good deal of length. It was some time before his part of the conversation lagged and he rose to go. §4. Luke waited only until he heard the door close upon the departing clergyman. Then he turned to Betty with a relieved sigh. "Phew!" he said. "I’m glad that’s over." She was sitting opposite him in the full glare of light from an old-fashioned, crystal-hung chandelier. Betty could bear strong lights. "Why?" she asked. Her brow was puckered, but her lips smiled. "I like him. He’s very good, and he’s doing a really great work. I like him ever so much." "Oh, yes," said Luke. "Nicholson’s all right. He has what he admires in other men: high convictions and the courage of them. Most of us always admire in others what we don’t have ourselves; but not Nicholson. He is doing a big work, too. But I’m glad he’s gone, just the same." "Why?" repeated Betty. Luke rose. He came over to Betty and stood looking down at her, his arms folded across his chest. "Because," he said, "I wanted to talk to you." "It didn’t look so. It looked as if you wanted to talk to Mr. Nicholson." "I wanted to talk to you and about you." She stopped fencing. She gave him her full, frank gaze. "Well?" she asked.