"How you do play with your own life, the way it might be a thing of no value!" "While I'm a slave it's of no value," said Ben, knowing that this was not at all true. "Mother of God, it's your very impudence that saves you. If you were what I've sometimes feared you might be, your conversation would not be so. You'd be sly, I think. You'd try to please me, I think, and not spit back at me like a little wildcat.... Well--Cornelius Barentsz was an agent, and that in the service of Queen Anne of England." "I don't believe it." "It doesn't matter. You haven't my ways of discovering truth. But now that you know I know this, will there be any particular thing you wish to tell me, Ben Cory?" "No, Shawn." "If you be what I devoutly pray you are, you've nothing to fear even in your impudence. But those who betray me I do not forgive." Ben knew--and had known for some time, he supposed--that he was in the presence of madness, whatever that is. It seemed not to be the simple, half-supernatural thing that the common speech heard in Ben's childhood had made of it. Shawn did not rave or babble or foam at the mouth; he never acted as one possessed of a devil ought to act, and besides, are there any devils? If so, what are they, and how was one who had lived three years with the calm skepticism of John Kenny to believe in them? One remembered Reuben snorting and gurgling and sometimes cursing over Cotton Mather's _Wonders of the Invisible World_, and then reading with greater joy the burlesque of it written by the merchant Robert Calef of Boston, whom Uncle John admired. Never mind about devils. Ben knew his own life could end at any moment. At that time, however, he had already lived three months with the nearness of sudden death--his own defiance, he sometimes thought, the sheerest bluff. Like living in the same den with a tiger who, for his own reasons, has so far refrained from destroying you. You can cringe and shiver for only a limited time; then it becomes tiresome, and you must look after your own occasions of eating and sleeping and waking no matter what the tiger does. And doubtless a tiger is more likely to pounce on a creature that cringes than on one who spits back at him. And in spitting back, in turning his face directly toward the lightning and to hell with the consequences, Ben had found, no doubt of it, a hot pleasure as definite, almost as keen as in the surging moments when Clarissa had loved him.