thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of a monkey kept in a cage by itself!” I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. “This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and wipe it?—damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world!... I will!”
Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. “That's all very well, Remington,” he said. “You mean to go.”
He stopped and began again. “If you didn't know you were in the wrong you wouldn't be so damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress.... You won't see you're a statesman that matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're throwing yourself away and accusing your country of rejecting you.”
He swung round upon his swivel at me. “Remington,” he said, “have you forgotten the immense things our movement means?”
I thought. “Perhaps I am rhetorical,” I said.
“But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay now—even now! Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but what of that? You'd be able to go on—perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You know, Remington—you KNOW.”
I thought and