She broke the silence with a question that might have been put with full knowledge of my thought.
“You are still wondering why I do not give you up?” she said.
I nodded. She leaned towards me across the table, and if ever the demons of mockery danced through a woman's eyes it was then; and her lips parted in a kind of silent laughter.
She touched the diamonds about her throat.
“It was these you came after?”
I nodded again. Evidently speech was of no avail with this lady. She asked questions at her will, and reserved the right of answering none.
“Tell me,” she said, “Why are you a thief? Why do you steal?”
“'Convey, the wise it call,'” I quoted. “Accident, or fate, or destiny, I suppose,” I went on, wondering more than ever at the question, but with a fluttering hope. Perhaps the lady (in spite of Charles—such things have been!) was an amateur sociologist, a crank reformer, or something of that sort. There had been no mockery in her tone when she asked the question; instead, I thought, a kind of pity. “Fate, or destiny,” I went on, “or what you please, 'There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,'” I quoted again, in my best actor manner.
“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me—I dare say there were many struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea for the exercise of clemency. “Come—were there not?—I dare say there were—circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?”
“Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.”