“Let me tell you something, Tom,” returned the Doctor. “It’s all very fine to talk this way; but this thing has become a fixed habit, just like the whiskey habit; and in fifteen or twenty years more you’ll be a chronic, physical, degenerate man. You’ll lose your self-respect. You’ll lose your quick wits, and your whole mind and body will be burning up with a slow fire.”
“Oh, you dear old fossil,” replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, “I’m no fool. I know what I’m doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I’m only a man,” he straightened up again, patted his mustache, and again tipped his hat into a cockey angle over his forehead, and went on, “not a monk.” He smiled, pivoted on his heel nervously and went on, “And what is more I can take care of myself.”
“Tom,” cried the Doctor in his treble, with excitement in his voice, “you can’t take care of yourself. No man ever 237lived who could. You may get away with your love affairs, and no one be the wiser; you may make a crooked or dirty million on a stock deal and no one be the wiser; but you’ll bear the marks to the grave.”
“So,” mocked the sneering voice of the young Judge, “I suppose you’ll carry the marks of all the men you’ve bought up in this town for twenty years.”
“Yes, Tom,” returned the Doctor pitifully, as he rose and stood beside the preening young man, “I’ll carry ’em to the grave with me, too; I’ve had a few stripes to-day.”
“Well, anyway,” retorted Van Dorn, pulling his hat over his eyes, restlessly, “you’re entitled to what you get in this life. And I’m going to get all I can, money and fun, and everything else. Morals are for sapheads. The preacher’s God says I can’t have certain things without His cracking down on me. Watch me beat Him at his own game.” It was all a make-believe and the Doctor saw that the real man was gone.
“Tom,” sighed the Doctor, “here’s the practical question–you realize what all this means to Laura? And Lila–why, Tom, can’t you see what it’s going to mean to her–to all of us as the years go by?”
Their eyes met and turned to the parcel on the floor. “You can’t afford–well, that sort of thing,” the Doctor punched the parcel contemptuously with his cane. “It’s all bad enough, Tom, but that way lies hell!”
Van Dorn turned upon the Doctor, and squared his jaw and said: “Well then–that’s the way I’m going–that way”–he nodded toward the package–“lies romance for me! There is the road to the only joy I shall ever know in this earth. There lies life and beauty and all that I live for, and I’m going that way.”
The Judge met the father’s beseeching face, with an angry glare–defiant and insolent.