eady for him. Do you get me? So
long. The old man's waiting for me."

It may seem odd that this piece of information did not produce an
immediately revolting effect. I knew that similar practices had been
tried on Krebs, but this was the first time I had heard of a definite
plan, and from a man like Bitter. As I made my way out of the building I
had, indeed, a nauseated feeling; Jason's "lawyer" was a dirty little
man, smelling of stale cigars, with a blue-black, unshaven face. In spite
of the shocking nature of his confidence, he had actually not succeeded
in deflecting the current of my thoughts; these were still running over
the scene in the directors' room. I had listened to him passively while
he had held my buttonhole, and he had detained me but an instant.

When I reached the street I was wondering whether Gorse and Dickinson and
the others, Grierson especially, could possibly have entertained the
belief that I would turn traitor? I told myself that I had no intention
of this. How could I turn traitor? and what would be the object? revenge?
The nauseated feeling grew more acute.... Reaching my office, I shut the
door, sat down at my desk, summoned my will, and began to jot down random
notes for the part of my speech I was to give the newspapers, notes that
were mere silly fragments of arguments I had once thought effective. I
could no more concentrate on them than I could have written a poem.
Gradually, like the smoke that settled down on our city until we lived in
darkness at midday, the horror of what Bitter had told me began to
pervade my mind, until I was in a state of terror.

Had I, Hugh Paret, fallen to this, that I could stand by consenting to an
act which was worse than assassination? Was any cause worth it? Could any
cause survive it? But my attempts at reasoning might be likened to the
strainings of a wayfarer lost on a mountain side to pick his way in the
gathering dusk. I had just that desperate feeling of being lost, and with
it went an acute sense of an imminent danger; the ground, no longer firm
under my feet, had become a sliding shale sloping toward an unseen
precipice. Perhaps, like the wayfarer, my fears were the sharper for the
memory of the beauty of the morning on that same mountain, when, filled
with vigour, I had gazed on it from the plain below and beheld the sun
breaking through the mists....

The necessity of taking some action to avert what I now realized as an
infamy pressed upon