himself.

"What ought I to have done?" he thought, "the beggar was within his
rights."

He stared at the pictures on the wall, and a tide of disgust surged up
in him.

"One or other of us," he reflected, "we make these women what they are.
And when we've made them, we can't do without them; we don't want to;
but we give them no proper homes, so that they're reduced to prowl about
the streets, and then we run them in. Ha! that's good--that's excellent!
We run them in! And here we sit and carp. But what do we do? Nothing!
Our system is the most highly moral known. We get the benefit without
soiling even the hem of our phylacteries--the women are the only ones
that suffer. And why should n't they--inferior things?"

He lit a cigarette, and ordered the waiter to bring a drink.

"I'll go to the Court," he thought; but suddenly it occurred to him that
the case would get into the local papers. The press would never miss
so nice a little bit of scandal--"Gentleman v. Policeman!" And he had a
vision of Antonia's father, a neighbouring and conscientious magistrate,
solemnly reading this. Someone, at all events, was bound to see his name
and make a point of mentioning it too good to be missed! And suddenly
he saw with horror that to help the woman he would have to assert again
that he had spoken to her first. "I must go to the Court!" he kept
thinking, as if to assure himself that he was not a coward.

He lay awake half the night worrying over this dilemma.

"But I did n't speak to her first," he told himself; "I shall only be
telling a lie, and they 'll make me swear it, too!"

He tried to persuade himself that this was against his principles, but
at the bottom of his heart he knew that he would not object to telling
such a lie if only guaranteed immune from consequences; it appeared to
him, indeed, but obvious humanity.

"But why should I suffer?" he thought; "I've done nothing. It's neither
reasonable nor just."

He hated the unhappy woman who was causing him these horrors of
uncertainty. Whenever he decided one way or other, the policeman's face,
with its tyrannical and muddy eyes, rose before him like a nightmare,
and forced him to an opposite conviction. He fell asleep at last with
the full determination to go and see what happened.

He woke with a sense of odd disturbance. "I can do no good by going," he
thought, remembering, aid lying very still; "they 're certain to believe
the policeman; I shall only blacke