‘Why should you? I never saw any argument worth the name on the other side. We have plenty of expressions of horror—but those are not argument. Indeed, the mass of the vulgar are so afraid of dying that, apparently in terror lest suicide should prove infectious, they treat in a brutal manner the remains of the man who has only had the courage to free himself from a burden too hard for him to bear. It is all selfishness—nothing else. They love their paltry selves so much that they count it a greater sin to kill oneself than to kill another man—which seems to me absolutely devilish. Therefore, the vox populi, whether it be the vox Dei or not, is not nonsense merely, but absolute wickedness. Why shouldn’t a man kill himself?’
Clara was looking on rather than listening, and her interest seemed that of amusement only. Mary’s eyes were wide-fixed on the face of Charley, evidently tortured to find that to the other enormities of his unbelief was to be added the justification of suicide. His habit of arguing was doubtless well enough known to her to leave room for the mitigating possibility that he might be arguing only for argument’s sake, but what he said could not but be shocking to her upon any supposition.
I was not ready with an answer. Clara was the first to speak.
‘It’s a cowardly thing, anyhow,’ she said.
‘How do you make that out, Miss Clara?’ asked Charley. ‘I’m aware it’s the general opinion, but I don’t see it myself.’
‘It’s surely cowardly to run away in that fashion.’
‘For my part,’ returned Charley, ‘I feel that it requires more courage than I’ve got, and hence it comes, I suppose, that I admire any one who has the pluck.’
‘What vulgar words you use, Mr Charles!’ said Clara.
‘Besides,’ he went on, heedless of her remark, ‘a man may want to escape—not from his duties—he mayn’t know what they are—but from his own weakness and shame.’
‘But, Charley dear,’ said Mary, with a great light in her eyes, and the rest of her face as still as a sunless pond, ‘you don’t think of the sin of it. I know you are only talking, but some things oughtn’t to be talked of lightly.’