“If that is your motive—a monkish idea that by punishing yourself you can wipe the slate of whatever things you’ve been writing on it since you let yourself go—it’s a gross fallacy, Phil, and you know it. You may fool yourself, but you can’t fool the God you still believe in.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Harry,” was the placatory answer to this. “I am still enough of a Christian to believe that there is only one sacrifice for sin. That isn’t it at all. I’m not trying to atone; I am merely trying to give another human being, to whose plane I have sunk myself, a chance for the only redemption that can ever come to her—in this life. I wish I could make you understand that I am not playing to my own gallery—not consciously, at least. The ego you speak of is very dead, these days. God knows, it needed to die. It wasn’t fit to live.”
It was in sheer desperation that Bromley fired his final shot.
“You told me once, Phil, that you had never said or done anything to let Jean know that you were in love with her, or to win her love. That was not true.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean just this: that you did win her love, whether you meant to or not.”
“I don’t believe it, Harry; but if it were true, it applied only to the Philip Trask she knew—or thought she knew—and not at all to the man who is going to marry Mona Connaghey. Surely you can see that?”
“I can see that you don’t yet know any more about women than a new-born baby!” was the fierce retort. “I have been living in the same house with Jean Dabney all summer, and——”
“Hold on,” Philip interposed; “let’s get this thing straight, while we are about it. I love Jean Dabney; I never knew how much I loved her until after I had made it a shame to think of her in the same breath with myself. But I have done just that, Harry. Whatever else I have gained or lost in the past few months, I haven’t lost the sense of the fitness of things. If Jean knew ... but probably she does know ... that is the bitterest drop in the cup for me ... to know that she’d feel she’d be obliged to cross the street to avoid meeting me. But what is done is done, and can’t be undone.”
“Then there is nothing I can say or do that will keep you from taking this last long jump into the depths?” said the play-boy, disheartened at last.