purely moral victory over his own selfishness and his
own cruelty? They won't even help him to see that it _is_ selfishness,
and that it _is_ cruelty. The essential principle of his rowing and
racing (a harmless principle enough, if you can be sure of applying it
to rowing and racing only) has taught him to take every advantage of
another man that his superior strength and superior cunning can suggest.
There has been nothing in his training to soften the barbarous hardness
in his heart, and to enlighten the barbarous darkness in his mind.
Temptation finds this man defenseless, when temptation passes his way.
I don't care who he is, or how high he stands accidentally in the social
scale--he is, to all moral intents and purposes, an Animal, and nothing
more. If my happiness stands in his way--and if he can do it with
impunity to himself--he will trample down my happiness. If my life
happens to be the next obstacle he encounters--and if he can do it with
impunity to himself--he will trample down my life. Not, Mr. Delamayn, in
the character of a victim to irresistible fatality, or to blind chance;
but in the character of a man who has sown the seed, and reaps the
harvest. That, Sir, is the case which I put as an extreme case only,
when this discussion began. As an extreme case only--but as a perfectly
possible case, at the same time--I restate it now."

Before the advocates of the other side of the question could open their
lips to reply, Geoffrey suddenly flung off his indifference, and started
to his feet.

"Stop!" he cried, threatening the others, in his fierce impatience to
answer for himself, with his clenched fist.

There was a general silence.

Geoffrey turned and looked at Sir Patrick, as if Sir Patrick had
personally insulted him.

"Who is this anonymous man, who finds his way to his own ends, and
pities nobody and sticks at nothing?" he asked. "Give him a name!"

"I am quoting an example," said Sir Patrick. "I am not attacking a man."

"What right have you," cried Geoffrey--utterly forgetful, in the strange
exasperation that had seized on him, of the interest that he had in
controlling himself before Sir Patrick--"what right have you to pick out
an example of a rowing man who is an infernal scoundrel--when it's
quite as likely that a rowing man may be a good fellow: ay! and a better
fellow, if you come to that, than ever stood in your shoes!"

"If the one case is quite as likely to occur as the other (whi