“Oh, tragic!” said Halleck, self-contemptuously.
“But I doubt if it would help you to tell it. I've too much respect for your good sense to suppose that it's an unreality; and I suspect that confession would only weaken you. If you told me, you would feel that you had made me a partner in your responsibility, and you would be tempted to leave the struggle to me. If you're battling with some temptation, some self-betrayal, you must make the fight alone: you would only turn to an ally to be flattered into disbelief of your danger or your culpability.”
Halleck assented with a slight nod to each point that the lawyer made. “You're right,” he said, “but a man of your subtlety can't pretend that he doesn't know what the trouble is in such a simple case as mine.”
“I don't know anything certainly,” returned Atherton, “and as far as I can I refuse to imagine anything. If your trouble concerns some one besides yourself,—and no great trouble can concern one man alone,—you've no right to tell it.”
“Another Daniel come to judgment!”
“You must trust to your principles, your self-respect, to keep you right—”
Halleck burst into a harsh laugh, and rose from his chair: “Ah, there you abdicate the judicial function! Principles, self-respect! Against that? Don't you suppose I was approached through my principles and self-respect? Why, the Devil always takes a man on the very highest plane. He knows all about our principles and self-respect, and what they're made of. How the noblest and purest attributes of our nature, with which we trap each other so easily, must amuse him! Pity, rectitude, moral indignation, a blameless life,—he knows that they're all instruments for him. No, sir! No more principles and self-respect for me,—I've had enough of them; there's nothing for me but to run, and that's what I'm going to do. But you're quite right about the other thing, Atherton, and I give you a beggar's thanks for telling me that my trouble isn't mine alone, and I've no right to confide it to you. It is mine in the sense that no other soul is defiled with the knowledge of it, and I'm glad you saved me from the ghastly profanation, the sacrilege, of telling it. I was sneaking round for your sympathy; I did want somehow to shift the responsibility on to you; to get you—God help me!—to flatter me out of my wholesome fear and contempt of myself. Well! That's past, now, and—Good night!” He abruptly turned away from Atherton and swung himself on his cane toward the door.
Atherton took up his hat and coat. “I'll walk home with you,” he said.
“All right,” returned Halleck, listlessly.
“How soon shall you go?” asked the lawyer, when they were in the street.