“You are mistaken again,” was the mild dissent. “She proved to me, no longer ago than last night, that she was capable of sacrificing herself utterly to break my determination. I have come around to your point of view, Harry. There is no poor wretch on earth too low down to answer the appeal if one only knows how to make it. It has cost me pretty much everything I value, or used to value, to learn this, but I have learned it, at last.” “But, good heavens--you can’t love this woman!” “Who said anything about love? Don’t make another mistake, Harry; it isn’t an infatuation. I am merely giving this girl a chance to become what God intended her to be--a one-man woman; and the obligation this will impose will keep me from sinking any deeper in the mud--or I hope it may.” For a fervid half-hour the play-boy argued and pleaded, all to no purpose. It was quite in vain that, argument and persuasion failing, he plied the whip, refusing to credit the altruistic motive, and accusing Philip of making the final and fatal sacrifice to his own swollen ego; not, indeed, that he believed this to be wholly true, but only that he hoped there might be enough of the steel of truth in it to strike fire upon the hard flint of Philip’s desperate resolution. “If that is your motive--a monkish idea that by punishing yourself you can wipe the slate of whatever things you’ve been writing on it since you let yourself go--it’s a gross fallacy, Phil, and you know it. You may fool yourself, but you can’t fool the God you still believe in.” “You’ve got me all wrong, Harry,” was the placatory answer to this. “I am still enough of a Christian to believe that there is only one sacrifice for sin. That isn’t it at all. I’m not trying to atone; I am merely trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk myself, a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her--in this life. I wish I could make you understand that I am not playing to my own gallery--not consciously, at least. The ego you speak of is very dead, these days. God knows, it needed to die. It wasn’t fit to live.” It was in sheer desperation that Bromley fired his final shot. “You told me once, Phil, that you had never said or done anything to let Jean know that you were in love with her, or to win her love. That was not true.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “I mean just this: that you did win her love, whether you meant to or not.” “I don’t believe it, Harry; but if it were true, it applied only to the Philip Trask she knew--or thought she knew--and not at all to the man who is going to marry Mona Connaghey. Surely you can see that?” “I can see that you don’t yet know any more about women than a new-born baby!” was the fierce retort. “I have been living in the same house with Jean Dabney all summer, and----”