"The point for our consideration is this," Lacon resumed, as calmly as if he were taking part in a meeting at the Bundespalast. "Admitting that you've both made a mistake, is there any possibility of retracing your steps?—or must you go on paying the penalty?"
Chip spoke without turning his eyes from the mountains: "What do you mean by—the penalty?"
"I suppose I mean the necessity of making four people unhappy instead of two."
"That is," Chip went on, "there are two who must be unhappy in any case."
"Precisely. There are two for whom there's no escape. Whatever happens now, nothing can save them. But, since that is so, the question arises whether it wouldn't be, let us say, a greater economy of human material if the other two—"
Edith looked mystified. "I don't know what you mean. Which are the two who must be unhappy in any case?"
Chip answered quietly, without turning his head: "He's one; my—my wife is the other."
"Oh!" With something between a sigh and a gasp she fell back against a pillar of the rotunda.
"It's the sort of economy of human material," Chip went on, his eye following the lines of the Wetterhorn up and down, "that a man achieves in saving himself from a sinking ship and leaving his wife and children to drown—assuming that he can't rescue them."
"The comparison isn't quite exact," Lacon replied, courteously. "Wouldn't it rather be that if a man can save only one of two women, he nevertheless does what he can?"