"It is," took up LeBeau, in haste to air his opinions on that topic. "Why? With a million direct responsibility ceases. You no longer need to steal in person, you break laws by proxy. Justice does not yet recognize indirect responsibility. A million—there's our standard! Make it anyway. So long as the track is masked society will judge you only by the way you use it. At the bottom of all is this," he summed up, pulling out his watch: "The world abhors petty sinning. Take a ten-dollar bribe, you are despicable. Distribute on election day one hundred thousand dollars for bribery and you are a leader of men. Take one life—murder! Sacrifice a thousand lives for a commercial advantage, you are a captain of industry! Crime is in the motive and the scale. When a man steals from hunger or kills for revenge the motive is evident and the guilt apparent. But for ambition, for fame, for supremacy—the motive is human and grandiose. The grand scale precludes the crime! You are right, Bo, you are right there. The million's everything!"
"Yes," Bofinger said pensively, whistling on his fingers, "but to get that first essential million you've got to run some risks."
"Otherwise life would be too easy," LeBeau said with a smile. "The only difficulty to-day is, as you say, to get the first million."
"It is all luck," Bofinger said moodily, and he remained silent, his gaze plunged into the street.
LeBeau scrutinized him, smiling at the appetite he had awakened, seeing the man in the bare, and wondering if there were any crime before which such a nature would retreat, were it once a question of the opportunity he coveted. He woke his companion, who jumped up rubbing his eyes, asking:
"Well, are you through with your honest man?"
"True, we had forgotten him," LeBeau said, glancing at Bofinger.
"Bo, good news!" Ganzler cried, looking through the window. "I see a client."
Across the street a little man, clad in black from a shovel hat to a cloak which he carried slung over his shoulder, was examining undecidedly the row of lawyers' offices. The shoulders, which were unusually broad, so diminished his size that they gave him the look of a dwarf. It was an odd figure, incongruous in the street, with an air of belonging to the traditions of the stage. The two reporters, amusing themselves at his expense, decided successively that he was a bandit, a barber, an actor, a magician, a poet, and an engraver of tombstones.