MR. Y. [Very much interested] Have—­you?

MR. X, Yes, I, and none else!  Perhaps you don’t care to shake hands with a murderer?

MR. Y. [Pleasantly] Oh, what nonsense!

MR. X. Yes, but I have not been punished,

ME.  Y. [Growing more familiar and taking on a superior tone] So much the better for you!—­How did you get out of it?

MR. X. There was nobody to accuse me, no suspicions, no witnesses.  This is the way it happened.  One Christmas I was invited to hunt with a fellow-student a little way out of Upsala.  He sent a besotted old coachman to meet me at the station, and this fellow went to sleep on the box, drove the horses into a fence, and upset the whole equipage in a ditch.  I am not going to pretend that my life was in danger.  It was sheer impatience which made me hit him across the neck with the edge of my hand—­you know the way—­just to wake him up—­and the result was that he never woke up at all, but collapsed then and there.

MR. Y. [Craftily] And did you report it?

MR. X. No, and these were my reasons for not doing so.  The man left no family behind him, or anybody else to whom his life could be of the slightest use.  He had already outlived his allotted period of vegetation, and his place might just as well be filled by somebody more in need of it.  On the other hand, my life was necessary to the happiness of my parents and myself, and perhaps also to the progress of my science.  The outcome had once for all cured me of any desire to wake up people in that manner, and I didn’t care to spoil both my own life and that of my parents for the sake of an abstract principle of justice.

MR. Y. Oh, that’s the way you measure the value of a human life?

MR. X. In the present case, yes.

MR. Y. But the sense of guilt—­that balance you were speaking of?

MR. X. I had no sense of guilt, as I had committed no crime.  As a boy I had given and taken more than one blow of the same kind, and the fatal outcome in this particular case was simply caused by my ignorance of the effect such a blow might have on an elderly person.

MR. Y. Yes, but even the unintentional killing of a man is punished with a two-year term at hard labour—­which is exactly what one gets for—­writing names.

MR. X. Oh, you may be sure I have thought of it.  And more than one night I have dreamt myself in prison.  Tell me now—­is it really as bad as they say to find oneself behind bolt and bar?

MR. Y. You bet it is!—­First of all they disfigure you by cutting off your hair, and if you don’t look like a criminal before, you are sure to do so afterward.  And when you catch sight of yourself in a mirror you feel quite sure that you are a regular bandit.

MR. X. Isn’t it a mask that is being torn off, perhaps?  Which wouldn’t be a bad idea, I should say.