“Say, I guess we’ve got Krebs’s goat all right, this time,” he told me confidentially, in a voice a little above a whisper; “he was busy with the shirt-waist girls last year, you remember, when they were striking.  Well, one of ’em, one of the strike leaders, has taken to easy street; she’s agreed to send him a letter to-night to come ’round to her room after his meeting, to say that she’s sick and wants to see him.  He’ll go, all right.  We’ll have some fun, we’ll be ready for him.  Do you get me?  So long.  The old man’s waiting for me.”

It may seem odd that this piece of information did not produce an immediately revolting effect.  I knew that similar practices had been tried on Krebs, but this was the first time I had heard of a definite plan, and from a man like Bitter.  As I made my way out of the building I had, indeed, a nauseated feeling; Jason’s “lawyer” was a dirty little man, smelling of stale cigars, with a blue-black, unshaven face.  In spite of the shocking nature of his confidence, he had actually not succeeded in deflecting the current of my thoughts; these were still running over the scene in the directors’ room.  I had listened to him passively while he had held my buttonhole, and he had detained me but an instant.

When I reached the street I was wondering whether Gorse and Dickinson and the others, Grierson especially, could possibly have entertained the belief that I would turn traitor?  I told myself that I had no intention of this.  How could I turn traitor? and what would be the object? revenge?  The nauseated feeling grew more acute....  Reaching my office, I shut the door, sat down at my desk, summoned my will, and began to jot down random notes for the part of my speech I was to give the newspapers, notes that were mere silly fragments of arguments I had once thought effective.  I could no more concentrate on them than I could have written a poem.  Gradually, like the smoke that settled down on our city until we lived in darkness at midday, the horror of what Bitter had told me began to pervade my mind, until I was in a state of terror.

Had I, Hugh Paret, fallen to this, that I could stand by consenting to an act which was worse than assassination?  Was any cause worth it?  Could any cause survive it?  But my attempts at reasoning might be likened to the strainings of a wayfarer lost on a mountain side to pick his way in the gathering dusk.  I had just that desperate feeling of being lost, and with it went an acute sense of an imminent danger; the ground, no longer firm under my feet, had become a sliding shale sloping toward an unseen precipice.  Perhaps, like the wayfarer, my fears were the sharper for the memory of the beauty of the morning on that same mountain, when, filled with vigour, I had gazed on it from the plain below and beheld the sun breaking through the mists....

The necessity of taking some action to avert what I now realized as an infamy pressed upon me, yet in conflict with the pressure of this necessity there persisted that old rebellion, that bitterness which had been growing all these years against the man who, above all others, seemed to me to represent the forces setting at nought my achievements, bringing me to this pass....