Examine me for a moment as I wait there.
I had been James’ friend for more than two years and a half. I had watched his career from the start. I knew him before he had located exactly the short cut to Fortune. Our friendship embraced the whole period of his sudden, extraordinary success.
Had not envy by that time been dead in me, it might have been pain to me to watch him accomplish unswervingly with his effortless genius the things I had once dreamt I, too, would laboriously achieve.
But I grudged him nothing. Rather, I had pleasure in those triumphs of my friend.
There was no confidence we had withheld from one another.
When he told me of his relations with Margaret Goodwin he had counted on my sympathy as naturally as he had requested and received my advice.
To no living soul, save James, would I have confessed my own tragedy—my hopeless love for Eva.
It is inconceivable that I should have misjudged a man so utterly as I misjudged James.
That is the latent factor at the root of my problem. The innate rottenness, the cardiac villainy of James Orlebar Cloyster.
In a measure it was my own hand that laid the train which eventually blew James’ hidden smoulder of fire into the blazing beacon of wickedness, in which my friend’s Satanic soul is visible in all its lurid nakedness.