Page:The Inheritors, An Extravagant Story.djvu/334

 that you have parted with your past and have no future. You had to do the work; I had to make you do it. I chose you because you would do it. That is all. . . I knew you; knew your secret places, your weaknesses. That is my power. I stand for the Inevitable, for the future that goes on its way; you for the past that lies by the roadside. If for your sake I had swerved one jot from my allotted course, I should have been untrue. There was a danger, once, for a minute. . . . But I stood out against it. What would you have had me do? Go under as Fox went under? Speak like him, look as he looks now. . . Me? Well, I did not.

"I was in the hands of the future; I never swerved; I went on my way. I had to judge men as I judged you; to corrupt, as I corrupted you. I cajoled; I bribed; I held out hopes; and with every one, as with you, I succeeded. It is in that power that the secret of the greatness which is virtue, lies. I had to set about a work of art, of an art strange to you; as strange, as alien as the arts of dead peoples. You are the dead now, mine the art of an ensuing day. All that remains to you is to fold your hands and