Page:Richard Marsh--The goddess a demon.djvu/283

Rh of the world. You have used him as a tool with which to save yourselves. You found him in a ditch—in the same ditch in which you were yourselves. Instead of helping him out you dragged him farther in, pressing him down in the mire, so that, by dint of standing on his body, you might yourselves reach the bank, at the cost of his entire destruction. Though he is guilty, your guilt is a thousand times as great."

"There speaks the actress. Your sentiments, Miss Moore, do you credit; though, being of the stage, they're stagey. They suppose that you can make a good man bad. I doubt it, be he old or young. All that you can do, is to bring to a head the badness which is in a bad one. Bernstein, your brother, and I, were born with a twist in us; a moral malformation; a trend in the grain which, as we got our growth, gave a natural inclination in a particular direction. I doubt if we could have gone straight if we had tried. You may take it for granted that we did not weary ourselves with vain efforts. I know that I did not. The things I liked had to be, like ginger, hot in the mouth; my pleasures had all to be well peppered. Your insipidities I never relished; nor was the fact that they happened to be virtuous a sufficient sauce. "As it happens, in this best of all possible worlds, spice costs money. And there's the rub.