"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to your children, Basil," said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.
After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing it.
"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay with us," I said.
"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"
"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"
"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why, as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"
"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.
"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil—"
"Oh, I don't claim it, exclusively!"
"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better. How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in—or out."