Markham’s eyes flashed angrily.
“And you deliberately interceded for him—to give him the opportunity?”
“Tut, tut, my dear fellow!” Vance reproached him. “Pray don’t give way to conventional moral indignation. However unethical—theoretically—it may be to take another’s life, a man’s own life is certainly his to do with as he chooses. Suicide is his inalienable right. And under the paternal tyranny of our modern democracy, I’m rather inclined to think it’s about the only right he has left, what?”
He glanced at his watch and frowned.
“D’ ye know, I’ve missed my concert, bothering with your beastly affairs,” he complained amiably, giving Markham an engaging smile; “and now you’re actually scolding me. ’Pon my word, old fellow, you’re deuced ungrateful!”
Endnotes
1 The Antlers Club has since been closed by the police; and Red Raegan is now serving a long term in Sing Sing for grand larceny. [↩︎]
2 Written especially for her by B. G. De Sylva. [↩︎]
3 “The Benson Murder Case” (Scribner’s, 1926). [↩︎]
4 The Loeb–Leopold crime, the Dorothy King case, and the Hall–Mills murder came later; but the Canary murder proved fully as conspicuous a case as the Nan Patterson–“Cæsar” Young affair, Durant’s murder of Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams in San Francisco, the Molineux arsenic-poisoning case, and the Carlyle Harris morphine murder. To find a parallel in point of public interest one must recall the Borden double-murder in Fall River, the Thaw case, the shooting of Elwell, and the Rosenthal murder. [↩︎]