CICELY. But you must do something with yourself.

BRASSBOUND (settling himself with his fists and elbows weightily on the
table and looking straight and powerfully at her). Look you: when you
and I first met, I was a man with a purpose. I stood alone: I saddled
no friend, woman or man, with that purpose, because it was against law,
against religion, against my own credit and safety. But I believed in
it; and I stood alone for it, as a man should stand for his belief,
against law and religion as much as against wickedness and selfishness.
Whatever I may be, I am none of your fairweather sailors that'll do
nothing for their creed but go to Heaven for it. I was ready to go to
hell for mine. Perhaps you don't understand that.

LADY CICELY. Oh bless you, yes. It's so very like a certain sort of man.

BRASSBOUND. I daresay but I've not met many of that sort. Anyhow,
that was what I was like. I don't say I was happy in it; but I wasn't
unhappy, because I wasn't drifting. I was steering a course and had work
in hand. Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop
to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

LADY CICELY. Sometimes he won't even stop to trouble about whether other
people are happy or not.

BRASSBOUND. I don't deny that: nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
But I was not self-seeking: it seemed to me that I had put justice above
self. I tell you life meant something to me then. Do you see that dirty
little bundle of scraps of paper?

LADY CICELY. What are they?

BRASSBOUND. Accounts cut out of newspapers. Speeches made by my uncle
at charitable dinners, or sentencing men to death--pious, highminded
speeches by a man who was to me a thief and a murderer! To my mind they
were more weighty, more momentous, better revelations of the wickedness
of law and respectability than the book of the prophet Amos. What are
they now? (He quietly tears the newspaper cuttings into little fragments
and throws them away, looking fixedly at her meanwhile.)

LADY CICELY. Well, that's a comfort, at all events.

BRASSBOUND. Yes; but it's a part of my life gone: YOUR doing, remember.
What have I left? See here! (He take up the letters) the letters
my uncle wrote to my mother, with her comments on their cold drawn
insolence, their treachery and cruelty. And the piteous letters she
wrote to him later on, returned unopened. Must they go too?

LADY CICELY (uneasily). I can't ask you to destroy your mother's
letter