"What can you do?"
"I can drink," he said, with awful meaning. "I can ruin you. And I will, unless you agree to part."
The Intellectual Half was looking at him with a strangely softened face. There was neither scorn nor hatred in that face. "Dimidium Animæ," he said, "Half of my Soul, I have something to say as well. Confess, however, first of all, that I was right. Had it not been for this step—the most severe measure possible, I admit—nothing would have been achieved. Eh?"
"Perhaps. You would work, you see."
"Yes. Well—I have made a discovery. It is that I have been too thorough. I don't quite understand how, logically and naturally, anything else was possible. I wanted, heaven knows, all the intellect there was; you were, therefore, bound to become the Animal, pure and simple. Well, you see, we are not really two, but one. Can't we hit upon an agreement?"
"What agreement?"
"Some agreement—some modus vivendi. I shall get, it is true, some of the Animal; you will get some of the Intellectual, but we shall be united again, and after all——" He looked very kindly upon himself, and held out his hand. So they stood with clasped hands looking at each other.
"I found it out through Nell," the Intellectual Half went on. "You went to see her every morning—I went every evening. You were always brimful of love for her; I, who knew this, was not moved in the slightest degree by her. Oh! I know that she is the best girl that the world, at this moment, has to show; I am fully persuaded of that: yet she has ceased to move me. I think of her Intellect, which is certainly much lower than my own, and I cannot even admire her. In other words, I cannot be moved by any woman. This terrifies me."
"Why?"
"It threatens my future. Don't you see? He who cannot be moved by woman is no longer man. But man can only be moved by brother man. If I cannot move men my career is at an end. What they call magnetism belongs to the animal within us. When that is gone, I now perceive, when the animal is killed, the rest of the man has no longer any charm, any attraction, any persuasion, any power of leading, teaching, compelling, or guiding. His success, whatever he does, is all glitter—evanescent glitter. He may sit down and hold his tongue, for he can do no more good."