"I want them."
"My God, Nan, haven't you a soul? Hasn't the life within no meaning for you? To me such luxury is sheer insanity. The possibilities of personal luxury have been exhausted thousands of years ago. It's commonplace, vulgar, and contemptible. If you wish for power why choose the lowest of all its forms? The way you are entering is worn bare by the feet of millions of forgotten fools whose bodies worms have eaten. Not one of them lives to-day even in a footnote of history. They sailed no unknown seas. They conquered no new worlds. They merely got dollars, spent them and died."
"And yet, Jim, you know as well as I do that money is the sign of success and power; its absence, of failure and weakness."
"To those who see the surface of things only—oh, Nan, why have you let this brood of black-winged bats build their nest in your heart?—this greed, this avarice, this envy of the rich——"
The girl lifted her hand with a gesture of impatience.
"You persist in misunderstanding me. Why should your desire for power be called high ambition, and mine a vulgar avarice? If you make a mistake in your career, you can correct it and begin again. Being a woman I cannot, for marriage is my only career. A mistake now would be to me fatal."
"And you are making the one tragic mistake no repentance can undo. You are choosing to commit the one unpardonable sin—the sin against the Spirit."
"And what, pray, is that?"
"The deliberate choice of evil, knowing it to be evil. Your heart is mine—mine, I tell you! Do you deny it?"
Again he seized her hand, gripped it fiercely, and looked into her eyes with tender, searching gaze.