“But I can’t quite see,” she objected, “why you went on when you had made up your mind from the start not to go back to China.”
“Can’t you?” said he. “I’ll explain. I’ve sworn that there’ll be no more idiocy on the part of John Baltazar to prevent him coming into his own. He is coming into it. That the F.O. should recognize his position was an essential factor of his own. When a man can dictate terms, he has established himself. See? I suppose,” said he, halting in his abrupt way, and thrusting his hands deep in his trousers pockets, “you think this is just childish vanity. Come, say it.”
She met his bright eyes and smiled up at him. “If I do, you won’t bite my head off?”
“No. I’ll convince you that it isn’t. Vanity, as its name implies, is emptiness. Negative. This isn’t vanity, it’s Pride. Something positive. My pet Deadly Sin. If you’ve got that strong, you can tell the six others to go back to hell. If I hadn’t got it, the others would have torn me to bits long ago. If I were a mongrel and thought myself a prize bull-pup—that would be vanity. But I know, hang it all, that I’m a prize bull-pup, and when I take leave to remind myself, and people like the F.O. of the fact, that’s Pride. And when I say I’ve sworn to fulfil the Destiny of the prize pup, John Baltazar, and be one of the intellectual forces that’ll carry the Empire along to Victory—that’s not vanity. Where’s the emptiness? It’s Pride—reckoned first of the Seven Deadly Sins. If I glory in it—well—according to the Theologians, it’s my damnation: according to me, it’s the other way about. Look. There’s another way of putting it——”
Suddenly she was smitten with the memory of Godfrey’s words five or six months ago, when he fumed at the bear-leading of Quong Ho—“Those infernal dancing eyes of his—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing.” The boy was right. She met just that pathetic appeal. He was so anxious to put himself right with her. He went on:
“If I were in the habit of vowing to perform impossible extravagances, that would be the sign of a vain man. But—apart from the Acts of God—and I suppose technically we must classify the wiping out of my life’s work under that heading—I have carried out every wild-cat scheme I’ve deliberately set my mind to. So when I say I’m coming into John Baltazar’s own, I know what I’m talking about, and that’s the sign of a proud man. And, my dear,” said he after a pause, occupied in filling and lighting his pipe, “I think this jolly old sin of mine keeps me from making an ass of myself in all sorts of other ways.”
Swiftly she applied these last words to the relations between them and confessed their truth. A vain man would have pestered the life out of her, confident in attaining his ends—ends as beautiful and spiritual as you please—until through sheer weariness she yielded. Such a one would enunciate and firmly believe in the proposition—she had not spent twenty years among men in angelic ignorance of their idiosyncrasies—that just hammer, hammer hard enough, and a woman will be bound to love you in the end. But there were others, with a deadly, sinful pride like Baltazar, who, scorning the vain, maintained the dignified attitude of the late lamented King Canute. He would not claim the impossible.
But this was a far cry from the Imperial Government Mission to the Far East. She asked, by way of escape from personal argument:
“After all, this Chinese proposition is a first-rate thing. Is it so very repugnant to you to go back?”
He stood over her with his clenched fists in the air.