A review of his recent conduct led him straight to a very unpalatable verdict. He had behaved as stupidly towards Janet as any average man of stone-age instincts. Because she had made one risky experiment in the field of sex and had almost been tempted to make an even riskier experiment in the field of subsistence, he had displayed in turn his pique, jealousy, anger and scorn. The childish resentment that had mastered him! And this when he owed Janet unbounded gratitude for her wisdom in frightening him off from a suicidal offer of marriage. In his varied exhibition of neolithic folly, where was the high-spirited intelligence he boasted of possessing?
Look how Janet had stuck to her guns! As he might have foreseen (if he hadn't been a perfect donkey!), she was going to make a glorious fight of it, on her own. She had given to Caesar the things that were Caesar's; and for the rest, she had kept her integrity intact.
Incidentally, there was a grain of comfort in the fact that she hadn't accepted M. St. Hilaire after all. A grain! Say rather, several tons.
Suspending this train of thought, Robert turned to his other great problem, his work in the labor movement. He asked himself whether he, like Janet, had kept his integrity intact. Two weeks ago he would have shouted out a triumphant yes. But now the thin edge of doubt had entered his soul. This incorruptible, critical gift—the gift above all others that he prized—was he justified in pushing its exercise to the furthest limit? He had always rejoiced in the uncompromising candor with which he had exposed and flayed the special weaknesses of the radical leaders, the general deficiencies of his own side. But when candor compelled you to smite people in the fifth rib in order to save their souls, weren't you carrying virtue a little too far?
Well, his employers on the Confederated Press thought so. And that they were not alone in their opinion was evident from his several failures. He counted them up: the Evening Chronicle, the Guild movement, the attempt to unionize the mercantile workers, the Labor Party publicity, and now this latest debacle. Not to mention his friendships!
He retained the hearty confidence of nobody.
Ought a successful honest man, then, to show as much discretion in the practice of candor as a successful knave shows in the practice of deceit? It would seem so. Plainly, he who would change the moral standards of his kind could not afford to be one thing to all men. Not a specialist or an extremist, in short.
How to be an aggressive revolutionist and at the same time a progressive evolutionist—this was the paradox that every effective radical had to embody in his own life.
It was clear that he would have to begin again at the bottom of the ladder.
This being so, the first thing to do was to ascertain his liabilities, material no less than spiritual.