"I want to die, Waller," he said feebly. "Help me back into my office. I can't face anybody."
Into Armstrong's sitting room, toward ten that night, Fosdick came limping and shuffling. Even had Armstrong been a "good hater" he could hardly have withstood the pathos of that abject figure. Being too broadly intelligent for more than a spasm of that ugliest and most ignorant of passions, he felt as if the broken man before him were the wronged and he himself the wronger. "But this man made a shameful, treacherous, unprovoked attempt to disgrace me," he reminded himself, in the effort to keep a just point of view for prudence's sake. It was useless. That ghastly, sunken face, those frightened, dim old eyes, the trembling step— If a long life of soul-prostitution had left Josiah Fosdick enough of natural human generosity to appreciate the meaning of Armstrong's expression, he might have been able to change his crushing defeat into what in the circumstances would have been the triumph of a drawn battle. But, except possibly the creative geniuses, men must measure their fellows throughout by themselves. Fosdick knew what he would do, were he in Armstrong's place. He clutched at Armstrong's hand with a cringing hypocrisy of deference that made Armstrong ashamed for him—and that warned him he dared not yet drop his guard.
"I've been trying to get you since three o'clock this afternoon," said Fosdick. "I had to see you before I went to bed." He sank into a chair and sat breathing heavily. He looked horribly old. "You don't believe I deliberately lied about that money, do you, Horace?"
"Is it necessary to discuss that, Mr. Fosdick? Hadn't we better get right at what you've come to see me about?"
"I've wired the governor. He don't answer. Morris refuses to see me. Westervelt—it's useless to see him—he has betrayed me—sold me out—he on whom I have showered a thousand benefits. I made that man, Horace, and he has rewarded me. That's human nature!"
Armstrong recalled that, when he was winning over Westervelt by convincing him of Fosdick's perfidy to him, Westervelt had made the same remark, had cried out that he loaned Fosdick the first five hundred dollars he ever possessed and had got him into the O.A.D. "It seems to me, Mr. Fosdick, that recriminations are idle," said he. "I assume you have something to ask or to propose. Am I right?"
"Horace, you and I are naturally friends. Why should we fight each other?"
"You have come to propose a peace?"
"I want us to continue to work together."
"That can be arranged," said Armstrong.