"One should not ask himself, What has the other man done? but, What will my self-respect let me do?"
He ignored this. "Let me tell you," he said, with a return of the imperious manner that was second nature to him nowadays. "This man brought me to New York because he found I knew how to manage the agents so that they would lure in the most suckers—that's the only word for it. When I came, I believed the O.A.D. was a big philanthropic institution—yes, I did, really! Of course I knew men made money out of it. I was making money out of it, myself. But I thought that, in the main, the object was to give people a chance to provide against old age and death."
"Yes, I remember," she said. "You used to talk about what a grand thing it was."
He laughed. "Well, we do give 'em some return for their money—if they aren't careless and don't give us a chance to cheat them out of part or all of it, under the laws we've been fixing up against them. But we never give anything like what's their due. I found I was little more than a puller-in for a den of respectable thieves—that life insurance is simply another of the devices of these oily rascals here in New York—like all their big stock companies and bonding schemes and the rest of it—a trick to get hold of money and use it for their own benefit. Ours is the vilest trick of all, though—it seems to me. For we play on people's heart strings, while the other swindles appeal chiefly to cupidity." He took a magazine from the table. "Look here!" He pointed to an illustrated advertisement. "It's the 'ad' of one of our rivals—same business as ours. See the widow with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the three little children clinging to her; see the heap of furniture on the sidewalk—that means they've ejected her for not paying the rent. And the type says, 'This wouldn't have happened if the father had been insured in the Universal.' Clever, isn't it? Well, the men back of that company and those back of ours and, worst of all, Trafford's infamous gang, all get rich by stealing from poor old people, from widows and orphans. That is Fosdick's business—robbing dead bodies, picking the pockets of calico mourning dresses."
It gave him relief and a sense of doing penance, to utter these truths about himself and his associates that had been rankling in him. As he believed she knew nothing of business and as he thought her sex did not reason but only felt, he assumed she would accept his own lenient view of his personal part in the infamy, of his own deviations from the "ideal" standards. Her expression disquieted him. "The most respectable people in the country are in it, in some branch of it," he hastened to explain, without admitting to himself that he was explaining. "You must read the list of our directors."
Her silence alarmed him. He wished he had not been so frank. Recalling his words he was appalled by their brutality; he could not deny to himself that they stated the truth, and he wondered that he had not seen that truth in its full repulsiveness until now. "Of course, they don't look at it that way," he went on. "A man can get his conscience to applaud almost anything he's making money out of—the more money, the easier."
"Then they do these things quite openly?" said Neva, in amazement.
"Openly? Certainly not," replied Armstrong, with a slight smile at her innocence.
"If they don't do them openly, they know just what they're about."
"No," he said, imperious and impatient. "You don't understand human nature. You don't appreciate how men delude themselves."