"Because we're riddled with compassion, I tell you. If we see a man poorer than we are, we get so apologetic we send him bouquets—our women do."
"Is that what the women here are doing?"
"Oh, yes. If there's a strike over at Long Meadow they put on their furs and go over and call on a few operatives and find eight living in one room, in a happy thrift, and they come back and hold an indignation meeting and 'protest'."
"You're not precisely a sentimentalist, are you?" said Jeff. He was seeing Choate in the new Addington as Choate presented it.
"No, by George! I want to see things clarified and the good old-fashioned virtues come back into their place—justice and common-sense. Compassion is something to die for. But you can't build states out of it alone. It makes me sick—sick, when I see men getting dry-rot."
Jeff's face was a map of dark emotion. His mind went back over the past years. He had not been made soft by the nemesis that laid him by the heels. He had been terribly hardened in some ways, so calloused that it sometimes seemed to him he had not the actual nerve surface for feeling anything. The lambent glow of beauty might fall upon him unheeded; even its lightnings might not penetrate his shell. But that had been better than the dry-rot of an escape from righteous punishment.
"You know, Choate," said he, "I believe the first thing for a man to learn is that he can't dodge penalties."
"I believe you. Though if he dodges, he doesn't get off. That's the other penalty, rot inside the rind. All the palliatives in the world—the lying securities and false peace—all of them together aren't worth the muscle of one man going out to bang another man for just cause. And getting banged!"
Jeff was looking at him quizzically.
"Where do you live," said he, "in the new Addington or the old one?"