“Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?”
And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?”
“Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.”
“He lived?—and you were sorry that he lived?”
“No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was glad he lived.”
“And yet you hated him?”
“I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another.”
“And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief——”
“Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.”
“My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!”