I'm ashamed
to tell you, Bunny, that I went there on purpose!"
I burst out laughing.
"You needn't be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was
rather hoping you were going to propose the other day on the
river."
"You were HOPING it?" said Raffles, with his eyes wide open.
Indeed, it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much
more ashamed than I felt.
"Yes," I answered, "I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn't
going to propose it."
"Yet you would have listened to me the other day?"
Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not
brazenly, you understand; not even now with the gusto of a man
who savors such an adventure for its own sake, but doggedly,
defiantly, through my teeth, as one who had tried to live
honestly and failed. And, while I was about it, I told him much
more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse
of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and
inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that
record was written only in one's own soul. It was the old story
of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against
nature, and there was an end of it.
Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my
conventional view. Human nature was a board of checkers; why not
reconcile one's self to alternate black and white? Why desire to
be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the
stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed
himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the
better for the shade.
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