"Give up?" he rejoined. "What d' you take me for? I'll fight—course I'll fight, till I'm down and out. People don't much believe in hell nowadays, Jenny. I do. I've been there. I'm bound to go there again, I don't know how soon. Don't think I'm begging for help or whining. Nobody goes to hell that hasn't got hell in him. He always gets just what's coming to him."
"No, no! It's not fair. I can't bear to hear you blame yourself. There's no justice in it. Both heredity and environment have been against you."
"Justice?" he repeated. He shook his head, with rather a grim smile. "Told you once I worked in a pottery. Supposing the clay of a piece wasn't mixed right, it wasn't the dish's fault if it cracked in the firing. Just the same, it got heaved on the scrap-heap."
Genevieve looked down at her clasped hands and whispered: "May not even a flawed piece prove so unique, so valuable in other respects, that it is cemented and kept?"
Blake laughed harshly. "Ever know a cracked dish to cement itself?"
"This is all wrong! The metaphor doesn't apply," protested the girl. "You're not a lifeless piece of clay; you're a man—you have a free, powerful will."
"That's the question. Have I? Has anybody? Some scientists argue that we're nothing but automatons—the creatures of heredity and environment."
"It's not true. We're morally responsible for all we do—that is, unless we're insane."
"And I'm only dippy, eh?" said Blake.
He moved ahead around the screening fronds of a young areca palm, and came to an abrupt halt, his eyes fixed on an object in the midst of the tropical undergrowth.