“If I know in myself that I have a choice, all you say goes for nothing,” persisted Clementina. “I am not at all sure I would not do wrong for the sake of another. The more one preferred what was right, the greater would be the sacrifice.”
“If it was for the grandeur of it, my lady, that would be for the man’s own sake, not his friend’s.”
“Leave that out then,” said Clementina.
“The more a man loved another—say a woman, as here in the story—then it seems to me, the more willing would he be that she should continue to suffer rather than cease by wrong. Think, my lady: the essence of wrong is injustice: to help another by wrong is to do injustice to somebody you do not know well enough to love for the sake of one you do know well enough to love. What honest man could think of that twice? The woman capable of accepting such a sacrifice would be contemptible.”
“She need not know of it.”
“He would know that she needed but to know of it to despise him.”
“Then might it not be noble in him to consent for her sake to be contemptible in her eyes?”
“If no others were concerned. And then there would be no injustice, therefore nothing wrong, and nothing contemptible.”
“Might not what he did be wrong in the abstract, without having reference to any person?”
“There is no wrong man can do but is a thwarting of the living Right. Surely you believe, my lady, that there is a living Power of right, whose justice is the soul of our justice, who will have right done, and causes even our own souls to take up arms against us when we do wrong.”