And then she asked me: "Have you ever killed a man?"
"Why, no," said I, "but I have tried to."
"He lived?--and you were sorry that he lived?"
"No," I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, "I was glad he lived."
"I would have taken his life in a rage," I said. "He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another."
"And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief----"
"Higgins is the name," said I. "You may call me Higgins."
"My dear Higgins," she went on, "you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!"
Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death, was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would. But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My doubts as to her sanity returned.
"Still," I said, for the sake of saying something, "if I killed a man, I should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death."
"Even if he deserved death?" she repeated, and sprang up, as if the phrase had touched her. "You make yourself the judge, you do, of when a man 'deserves' to lose his wealth. Come, what is your idea of when he deserves to die?"
Up and down the room she swept; yet still watchful. And the emotion which she had so long suppressed burst out into a poisonous lovely bloom that suffused her being with an awful beauty.
"When does he deserve to die?" she repeated. "Listen to me. I knew a woman once--no matter where--no matter when--who was sold--sold! I say--by the sordid devil she called her father, to the veriest beast that ever trod this earth. Her beauty--for she had beauty--her wit--for wit she had--became this husband's chattels before she turned her twentieth year. She would never have loved him, but she would have been faithful to him--she was faithful to him, in fact, in spite of all his drunkenness and bestiality--and abuse! It was not neglect alone that she had to complain of--she had never looked for understanding or sympathy. But she had not looked for abuse. Abuse, I say, and worse than abuse. Before she had been married a year she knew what it was, not only to feel the weight of a heavy hand and to hide the bruises from her maid, but to see other women brought into her very house. Pah!--hate? She hated him? Hate is not the word. She became a live coal. But she never cried out; she found strength to smile at him even when he beat her; she was proud enough for that. It pleased him, in his hellish humor, and because she was made to shine, to cage her in a country house, and there to taunt her that although she was sold to him she got little of what money may buy. And still she smiled at him, and still her hatred grew through all the weeks and months until it filled her whole being. And then--love came. For God has ordained that love may enter even Hell. Love, I say; and she loved this lover of hers with a passion that was measured only by the degree in which she hated her husband. And she would have left with him; but on the very night they would have flown together her lord and master-----"