"You shouldn't have led him into temptation. You are particeps criminis, and the partaker is as bad as the thief. Don't trust without taking security, my friend; it's offering a premium to crime. Consider your guilt now! Think of the family into whose innocent bosom you have brought sin and remorse! Who is the luckless person?"
"Sandford!"
"I knew it. I expected it. He was too good by half. I didn't blame him for his widow-and-orphan business; somebody must do it; but I made up my mind some time ago that he would come to grief."
"Prophets are always plenty after the event."
"True, my friend. But just think! He passed by my pictures in the Exhibition, and bought the canvas of my friend Greenleaf,—a man of genius, doubtless, but young, you understand, young. Can you conceive of the wickedness? I felt sure from that moment, that, if he were not totally depraved, he at least had a moral inability, as the preachers call it, that would be his ruin."
"Well, he is ruined effectually; but the worst of it is, that he has dragged innocent people down with him."
"'Innocent,'—yes, you have the word. A man that cares for money at all, and trusts all he has without security to any fair-spoken financier, is an innocent, truly."
"Well, there is no use in lamenting, and just as little in the consolation of thinking how the loss might have been avoided."
"I don't know. I don't admit that. I am not to be deprived of the rights of a freeborn American. The 'I told-you-so' is a fine balm for all sorts of wounds,—rather more soothing to physician than patient, perhaps. Combined with the 'You-might-have-known-it,' it gets up a wholesome blister in the least possible time, especially where 'a raw' has been established previously."
"I don't think I was prudent."