Basine, in the car, had become aware vaguely of what awaited him. He had recalled and repressed the recollection instantly, the Hill case pending trial before him. And under the surface of his thought the entire drama of the bribe had enacted itself in advance. Ware would offer him something. Yes, and Ware was a man to know, one who could be of vital use in his climb. If Ware asked him to do something it would be wise to do it. He had been eager for the interview and a part of his eagerness had been a desire to grant the traction baron the favor he was going to ask.
But the incident had come during a curious crisis in Basine's life, a crisis that had piled up since his youth. A consciousness had been growing in him of his duplicity. He had been aware of it, but in a different way, during his youth and the early years of his marriage. It had not made him uncomfortable then. He had been able to lie with a clear conscience. Ruses by which he established himself in the eyes of others, not as he was but as he desired them to think him, had seemed to him then the product of a practical, superior nature.
Slowly, however, his poise in the face of his own duplicities had begun to crumble. He had begun to feel himself filled with the uncertainties of a man forced to conceal too many things from himself. Fitting his hypocricies and lies into worthy necessities had become too complex a business, demanding too much of his energies.
The inner situation in which Basine found himself as he matured had in no way changed his nature. He had gone ahead as always, stumbling finally into a climax of deceits in his relation with the young woman he had hired as his secretary.
In the five months she had worked for him he had been in love with her but had managed to withhold the fact from both of them. He had invented exhaustless explanations for his interest in her, for his desire to be near her, for the increased aversion that had grown in him toward Henrietta and his home.
The crisis had accumulated and reached a head during the services in the Gilchrist home. Here his pent-up self-repugnance, his growing impulse to expurgate the duplicities of his life, had found a minor outlet in the sudden religious faith that had possessed him after his half-hour of doubts. Ware's bribe had come opportunely. Basine's inexplicable anger on sensing the impending bribe, had been his self answer to the eager desire to comply that had struggled to assert itself in him.
And when the man had begun the actual words that meant bribe, he had seized on the situation as a vindication. Opportunity to rehabilitate himself, to wipe out with a single gesture the clutter of dishonesties which were beginning to inconvenience him. He had embraced it and emerged from the club a man, remade. No longer an inwardly shifty Basine able to rise to righteousness only by avoiding his memories. But a Basine with a platform inside him on which he might stand fearlessly. The platform—I am honest. I refused a bribe—had erected itself over the complex memories of himself. They were obliterated now.
He entered his chambers with a serious happiness in his heart. A miracle had happened and he had been given absolution—by himself.