His friend’s voice became judicial.

“A man ought not to suffer,” he said, poring over his whisky, “because a woman gets hysteria.  You have to think of Society, your children, house, money arrangements, a thousand things.  It’s all very well to talk.  How do you like this whisky?”

“The part of the good citizen, in fact,” said Shelton, “self-preservation!”

“Common-sense,” returned his friend; “I believe in justice before sentiment.”  He drank, and callously blew smoke at Shelton.  “Besides, there are many people with religious views about it.”

“It’s always seemed to me,” said Shelton, “to be quaint that people should assert that marriage gives them the right to ‘an eye for an eye,’ and call themselves Christians.  Did you ever know anybody stand on their rights except out of wounded pride or for the sake of their own comfort?  Let them call their reasons what they like, you know as well as I do that it’s cant.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Halidome, more and more superior as Shelton grew more warm; “when you stand on your rights, you do it for the sake of Society as well as for your own.  If you want to do away with marriage, why don’t you say so?”

“But I don’t,” said Shelton, “is it likely?  Why, I’m going—­” He stopped without adding the words “to be married myself,” for it suddenly occurred to him that the reason was not the most lofty and philosophic in the world.  “All I can say is,” he went on soberly, “that you can’t make a horse drink by driving him.  Generosity is the surest way of tightening the knot with people who’ve any sense of decency; as to the rest, the chief thing is to prevent their breeding.”

Halidome smiled.

“You’re a rum chap,” he said.

Shelton jerked his cigarette into the fire.

“I tell you what”—­for late at night a certain power of vision came to him—­“it’s humbug to talk of doing things for the sake of Society; it’s nothing but the instinct to keep our own heads above the water.”

But Halidome remained unruffled.

“All right,” he said, “call it that.  I don’t see why I should go to the wall; it wouldn’t do any good.”

“You admit, then,” said Shelton, “that our morality is the sum total of everybody’s private instinct of self-preservation?”

Halidome stretched his splendid frame and yawned.

“I don’t know,” he began, “that I should quite call it that—­”

But the compelling complacency of his fine eyes, the dignified posture of his healthy body, the lofty slope of his narrow forehead, the perfectly humane look of his cultivated brutality, struck Shelton as ridiculous.

“Hang it, Hall” he cried, jumping from his chair, “what an old fraud you are!  I’ll be off.”

“No, look here!” said Halidome; the faintest shade of doubt had appeared upon his face; he took Shelton by a lapel:  “You’re quite wrong—­”