Would you,"-- he spoke deliberately, "would you have had me put my name to a public statement which I, rightly or wrongly, believed to be false, because you asked me?
You owe it to me to answer." She could not escape the penetrating fire of his eye.

The man's mildness, his quiet self-renouncing reserve, were all burnt up at last in this white heat of an accusing passion.

In return she began to forget her own resolve to bear herself gently.
"You don't remember," she cried, "that what divided us was your--your--incapacity to put the human pity first; to think of the surrounding circumstances--of the debt that you and I and everybody like us owe to a man like Hurd--to one who had been stunted and starved by life as he had been." Her lip began to tremble.
"Then it comes to this," he said steadily, "that if I had been a poor man, you would have allowed me my conscience--my judgment of right and wrong--in such a matter.

You would have let me remember that I was a citizen, and that pity is only one side of justice! You would have let me plead that Hurd's sin was not against me, but against the community, and that in determining whether to do what you wished or no, I must think of the community and its good before even I thought of pleasing you.

If I had possessed no more than Hurd, all this would have been permitted me; but because of Maxwell Court--because of my _money_,"-- she shrank before the accent of the word--"you refused me the commonest moral rights.