"Impossible!"
He turned and gazed at me. "It's so, old man, upon my honour."
"You are mistaken, Dixon."
"I know you are as true as steel," he muttered. "That is why I do not even feel a wish to thwart the fates. I am nothing but an interloper, a marplot. I ought to efface myself. When I am strong enough I shall. But I wish you'd be frank with me—Hugh, entirely frank. You think you despise her now, but you are sure you have no other feeling deep at heart? Think well before you answer, Hugh!"
"Why?"
"Because if I were sure that you cared, too, I would find my happiness in helping. You are worthy of her—and she—as God hears me, is worthy of the best man living."
"Dixon! Dixon!"
"Oh! I know this must sound oddly from my lips. But though I've been a fool, I'm wiser now. I hold a purer, finer faith; a human faith. And it is now my deep belief that the greatest crime of all is the prevention of the fullest union of predestined mates—and all that sin entails—the birth of children generated by the fires of lust and hate upon the copperplate of physical and psychical indifference; the production of a race prenatally ordained to be degenerates; the determination of unhappy souls galled into madness by their chains,—their ultimate destruction."
He got suddenly afoot and raised his hands on high. "I tell you, Hugh!" he cried, with eyes afire, "there is no surer way to damnation, no surer path. We are born into this world for one strong purpose which is told us by our hearts if we will hear them. And this concerns ourselves not half so much as our potentialities of helping by their proper use the unborn spirits placed by Providence at our control and mercy. It is then for us to choose if we will be servants of the good, to assist in their perfection, or the servants of the evil to promote their desolation and to advance the stages of their ruin. No human being has the right to bring any but a love child into the world. That which is not a love child is a child of hate. There is no course between. And because the father of a child of hate is a criminal for whom there is no punishment conceivable, to a finite mind, acute enough on earth his expiation of his crime will but begin at death. You laugh at me."