s strength, but it is also weakness
Conscience is a bad weighing-machine
Conscience is only an affair of environment and of education
Find it more easy to make myself feared than loved
Force, which is the last word of the philosophy of life
I believed in the virtue of work, and look at me!
Intelligent persons have no remorse
It is only those who own something who worry about the price
Leant--and when I did not lose my friends I lost my money
Leisure must be had for light reading, and even more for love
People whose principle was never to pay a doctor
Power to work, that was never disturbed or weakened by anything
Reason before the deed, and not after
Will not admit that conscience is the proper guide of our action
CONSCIENCE
By HECTOR MALOT
BOOK 2.
CHAPTER XI
THE INSTRUMENT OF DEATH
When, after two hours' sleep, Saniel woke, he did not at first think of
this knife; he was tired and dull. Mechanically he walked about his room
without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he were in a state
of somnambulism, and it astonished him, because he never felt weariness
of mind any more than of body, no matter how little he had slept, nor how
hard he had worked.
But suddenly, catching a glimpse of the knife that he had placed on the
mantel, he received a shock that annihilated his torpor and his fatigue.
It dazzled him like a flash of lightning.
He took it, and, going to the window, he examined it by the pale light of
early morning. It was a strong instrument that, in a firm hand, would be
a terrible arm; newly sharpened, it had the edge of a razor.
Then the idea, the vision that had come to him two hours before, came
back to him, clear and complete at nightfall, that is, at the moment when
the concierge was in the second wing of the building, he mounted to
Caffie's apartment without being seen, and with this knife he cut his
throat. It was as simple as it was easy, and this knife left beside the
corpse, and the nature of the wound, would lead the police to look for a
butcher, or at least a man who was in thehabit of using a knife of this
kind.
The evening before, when he had discussed Caffie's death, the how and the
when still remained vague and uncertain. But now the day and the means
were definitely settled: it should be with this knife, and this evening.
This shook him out of his torpor and made him shudder.
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