"Good for you! I hope you're not going to be stingy with it."
"No; I'll tell you—partly because I want to talk about it to some one, and just at present there's no one else."
"Thanks!"
"The secret of success, as I reason it out, must be something that will protect a weak person against a strong one—me, for instance, against J. Howard Brokenshire—and work everything out all right. There," I cried, "I've said the word."
"You've said a number. Which is the one?"
Anxiety not to seem either young or didactic or a prig made my tone apologetic.
"There's such a thing as Right, written with a capital. If I persist in doing Right—still with a capital—then nothing but right can come of it."
"Oh, can't it!"
"I know it sounds like a platitude—"
"No, it doesn't," he interrupted, rudely, "because a platitude is something obviously true; and this isn't."