"Then you believe this man Penfield will never be punished?"
He thought over the question for a moment or two.
"No, I don't think he ever will. He stands for something that is as active and enduring in our American life as are the powers arrayed against him. You see, the district-attorney's office represents the centripetal force of society. Penfield stands for the centrifugal force. They fight and battle against one another, and first one seems to gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight between the two, the struggle between the legal and the illegal, makes up the balance of everyday life."
"You mean that we're all gamblers, at heart?"
"I mean that every Broadway must have its Bowery, that the world can only be so good—if you try to make it better, it breaks out in a new place—and the master criminal is a man who takes advantage of this nervous leakage. We call him the Occasional Offender—and he's the most dangerous man in all society. In other words, the passion, as you say, for gambling, is implanted in all of us; the thought of some vast hazard, of some lucky stroke of fate, is in your head as often as it is in mine. You tell me you are a hard-working art collector, making a decent living by gadding about Europe picking up knick-knacks. Now, suppose I came to you with a proposal like this: Suppose I told you that without any greater personal discomfort, without any greater danger or any harder work, you might, say, join forces with me and at one play of the game haul in fifty thousand dollars from men who no more deserve this money than we do, I'll warrant that you'd think over it pretty seriously."
The woman at his side laughed a little, and then gave a significantly careless shrug of her small shoulders.
"Who wouldn't?" she said, and their eyes met questioningly, in the uncertain light.
"Women, as a rule, are timid," he said at last. "They usually prefer the slower and safer road."
"Sometimes they get tired of it. Then, too, it isn't always safe just because it's slow!"
It seemed to give him the opening for which he had been waiting. He looked at her with undisguised yet calculating admiration.