He favoured me with a quizzical smile. "Hump, I have studied some
grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled. 'Was mine,' you
should have said, not 'is mine.'"

"It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics," I answered.

It was possibly a minute before he spoke.

"D'ye know, Hump," he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it an
indefinable strain of sadness, "that this is the first time I have heard
the word 'ethics' in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on
this ship who know its meaning."

"At one time in my life," he continued, after another pause, "I dreamed
that I might some day talk with men who used such language, that I might
lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold
conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as
ethics. And this is the first time I have ever heard the word
pronounced. Which is all by the way, for you are wrong. It is a
question neither of grammar nor ethics, but of fact."

"I understand," I said. "The fact is that you have the money."

His face brightened. He seemed pleased at my perspicacity. "But it is
avoiding the real question," I continued, "which is one of right."

"Ah," he remarked, with a wry pucker of his mouth, "I see you still
believe in such things as right and wrong."

"But don't you?--at all?" I demanded.

"Not the least bit. Might is right, and that is all there is to it.
Weakness is wrong. Which is a very poor way of saying that it is good
for oneself to be strong, and evil for oneself to be weak--or better yet,
it is pleasurable to be strong, because of the profits; painful to be
weak, because of the penalties. Just now the possession of this money is
a pleasurable thing. It is good for one to possess it. Being able to
possess it, I wrong myself and the life that is in me if I give it to you
and forego the pleasure of possessing it."

"But you wrong me by withholding it," I objected.

"Not at all. One man cannot wrong another man. He can only wrong
himself. As I see it, I do wrong always when I consider the interests of
others. Don't you see? How can two particles of the yeast wrong each
other by striving to devour each other? It is their inborn heritage to
strive to devour, and to strive not to be devoured. When they depart
from this they sin."

"Then you don't believe in altruism?" I asked.

He received the word as if it had a familiar ring, though he po