might be applicable.  If by marrying a man whom she did not love she thought she could help another whom she did love, a culpable sacrifice was just the thing of which she would be capable.  He called it culpable sacrifice with some emphasis for in his eyes all sacrifice was culpable.  It was more than culpable, in that it verged on the absurd.  There were few teachings of an illogical religion, few promptings of a misdirected energy, for which he had a greater scorn than the precept that the strong should suffer for the weak, or one man for another.  Every man for himself and the survival of the fittest was the doctrine by which he lived; and his abhorrence of anything else was the more intense for the moment because he found himself in a situation where he might be expected to repudiate his faith.

But there it was, that something in public opinion which, in certain circumstances, might challenge him—­might ask him for magnanimity, might appeal to him for mercy, might demand that he make two other human beings happy while he denied himself.  It was preposterous, it was grotesque, but it was there.  He could hear its voice already, explaining that since Miriam Strange had given him her word in an excess of self-devotion, it was his duty to let her off.  He could see the line of argument; he could hear the applause following on his noble act.  He had heard it before—­especially in the theatre—­and his soul had shaken with laughter.  He had read of it in novels, only to toss such books aside.  “The beauty of renunciation,” he had often said, “appeals to the morbid, the sickly, and the sentimental.  It has no function among the healthy and the sane.”  He had not only said that, but he had believed it.  He believed it still, and lived by it.  By doing so he had amassed his modest fortune and won a respected position in the world.  He had not got on into middle life without meeting the occasion more than once when he could have saved others—­a brother, or a sister, or a friend—­and forborne to save himself.  He had felt the temptation and resisted it, with the result that he was up in the world when he might have been down in it, and envied by those who would have despised him without hesitation when they had got out of him all he could give.  He could look back now and see the folly it would have been had he yielded to impulses that every sentimentalist would have praised.  He was fully conscious that the moment of danger might be on the point of returning again, and that he must be prepared for it.

He was able to strengthen himself with the greater conviction because of his belief in the sanctity of rights.  The securing of rights, the defining of rights, the protection of rights, had been his trade ever since he was twenty-five.  The invasion of rights was among the darkest crimes in his calendar.  In the present case his own rights could not be called into question; they were inviolable.  Miriam Strange had come to him deliberately, and for due consideration