"I hope so. I didn't expect that you'd talk of my giving you away, as you call it—to any one."
"But you're wrong," he said, with a return to the laughing bravado which concealed his inward repugnance to his position. "You're wrong. I'll give you that tip now. I'll fight fair. I sha'n't be grateful. I'll profit by your magnanimity. Remember it's my part in the world to be unscrupulous. It has to be. I've told you so. With me the end justifies the means—always; and when the end is to keep my word to Evie, it will make no difference to me that you were too high-minded to put the big obstacle in my way."
"You'll not expect me to be otherwise than sorry for that—for your sake."
"No, I dare say. But I can't stop to think of what any one feels for my sake when I know what I feel for my own."
"Which is only an additional reason for my being—sorry. You don't find fault with me for that?"
"I do. I don't want you to be sorry. I want to convince you. I want you to see things from my point of view—how I've been placed. Good Lord! it's hard enough, without the sense that you're sitting in judgment on me."
"I'm not sitting in judgment on you—except in so far as concerns Evie Colfax. If it was anybody else—"
"But it couldn't be anybody else It's Evie or no one. She's everything on earth to me. She's to me what electricity is to the wire—that which makes it a thing alive."
"To be a thing alive isn't necessarily the highest thing."
"Ah, but that doesn't apply to me. It's all very well for other men to say, 'All is lost to save honor.' They have compensations. I haven't. You might as well ask a man to think of the highest thing when he's drowning."