him, and until he could make his losses good by other
operations. From time to time he was more fortunate; and whenever he
dramatized himself in an explanation to the directors, as he often did,
especially of late, he easily satisfied them as to the nature of his
motives and the propriety of his behavior, by calling their attention to
these successful deals, and to the probability, the entire probability,
that he could be at any moment in a position to repay all he had
borrowed of the company. He called it borrowing, and in his long habit
of making himself these loans and returning them, he had come to have a
sort of vague feeling that the company was privy to them; that it was
almost an understood thing. The president's violence was the first
intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness
that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose
discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning's
paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the
papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some
novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the
presence of the directors, he had refused to admit it to himself; but
after they adjourned, and he was left alone, he realized the truth. He
was like those fools, exactly like them, in what they had done, and in
the way of doing it; he was like them in motive and principle. All of
them had used others' money in speculation, expecting to replace it, and
then had not been able to replace it, and then had skipped, as the
newspapers said.

Whether he should complete the parallel, and skip, too, was a point
which he had not yet acknowledged to himself that he had decided. He
never had believed that it need come to that; but, for an instant, when
the president said he could wish him nothing better on his way home than
a good railroad accident, it flashed upon him that one of the three
alternatives before him was to skip. He had the choice to kill himself,
which was supposed to be the gentlemanly way out of his difficulties,
and would leave his family unstained by his crime; that matter had
sometimes been discussed in his presence, and every one had agreed that
it was the only thing for a gentleman to do after he had pilfered people
of money he could not pay back. There was something else that a man of
other instincts and weaker fibre might do, and that was to stand his