FALLON: (Unmoved.) When did you see this—this thing last?
MRS. HOWARD: This morning. He'd read about you in the papers. He knows I knew you in San Francisco. He said you'd "struck it rich," and that you'd give me the money. (Rises, and comes to him.) But, get this straight, Dick. I didn't come here for money. I don't want money. I won't take money. I came to you because you are my best friend, and Tom's best friend, and because I need a man's brain, a man's advice.
FALLON: (Contemptuously.) Advice! Hell! Am I the sort of man that gives girls—advice? (With rough tenderness.) Now, you go home to Tom, and tell him I'm coming to dinner. (Impressively.) And leave this leech to me. And, don't worry. This thing never happened, it's just a bad dream, a nightmare. Just throw it from your shoulders like a miner drops his pack. It's never coming back into your life again.
MRS. HOWARD: (Earnestly.) No! I won't let you pay that man! He'd hound you, as he's hounded me!
FALLON: (Indignantly.) Pay him? Me? I haven't got enough money to pay him!
MRS. HOWARD: What!
FALLON: No man on earth has money enough to pay blackmail. Helen, this is what I think of a blackmailer: The lowest thing that crawls, is a man that sends a woman into the streets to earn money for him. Here, in New York, you call them "cadets." Now, there's only one thing on earth lower than a cadet, and that's the blackmailer, the man who gets money from a woman—by threatening her good name—who uses her past as a club—who drags out some unhappy act of hers for which she's repented, in tears, on her knees, which the world has forgotten, which God has forgiven. And, for that past sin, that's forgotten and forgiven, this blackguard crucifies her. And the woman—to protect her husband and her children, as you have done—to protect her own good name, that she's worked for and won, starves herself to feed that leech. And, you ask me, if I'm going to feed him, too! Not me! Helen, down in lower California, there are black bats, the Mexican calls "Vampire" bats. They come at night and fasten on the sides of the horses and drink their blood. And, in the morning when you come to saddle up, you'll find the horses too weak to walk, and hanging to their flanks these vampires, swollen and bloated and drunk with blood. Now, I've just as much sympathy for Mr. Mohun, as I have for those vampires, and, I'm going to treat him just as I treat them! Where is he?
MRS. HOWARD: Downstairs. In the cafe.
FALLON: Here, in this hotel?
MRS. HOWARD: Yes.