'Stephen! How horrid you are!' 'You might, even!' said Woodruff, gazing at Vera.
'Charlie! Why, the blood alone—'
'There isn't always blood,' said the oracular husband.
'Listen here,' proceeded Woodruff, who read variously and enjoyed philosophical speculation. 'Supposing that by just taking thought, by just wishing it, an Englishman could kill a mandarin in China and make himself rich for life, without anybody knowing anything about it! How many mandarins do you suppose there would be left in China at the end of a week!'
'At the end of twenty-four hours, rather,' said Cheswardine grimly.
'Not one,' said Woodruff.
'But that's absurd,' Vera objected, disturbed. When these two men began their philosophical discussions they always succeeded in disturbing her. She hated to see life in a queer light. She hated to think.
'It isn't absurd,' Woodruff replied. 'It simply shows that what prevents wholesale murder is not the wickedness of it, but the fear of being found out, and the general mess, and seeing the corpse, and so on.'
Vera shuddered.
'And I'm not sure,' Woodruff proceeded, 'that murder is so very much more wicked than lots of other things.'