'
Again and again it came back to that. Every novice in unimpassioned
crime has that thought, and the more self-conscious the man, the
more impressed with a sense of his own importance, so much the
weightier is its effect with him.
We know in what spirit John Hewett regarded rebels against the law.
Do not imagine that any impulse of that nature actuated his son.
Clara alone had inherited her father's instinct of revolt. Bob's
temperament was, in a certain measure, that of the artist; he felt
without reasoning; he let himself go whither his moods propelled
him. Not a man of evil propensities; entertain no such thought for a
moment. Society produces many a monster, but the mass of those whom,
after creating them, it pronounces bad are merely bad from the
conventional point of view; they are guilty of weaknesses, not of
crimes. Bob was not incapable of generosity; his marriage had, in
fact, implied more of that quality than you in the upper world can
at all appreciate. He neglected his wife, of course, for he had
never loved her, and the burden of her support was too great a trial
for his selfishness. Weakness, vanity, a sense that he has not
satisfactions proportionate to his desert, a strong temptation--
here are the data which, in ordinary cases, explain a man's
deliberate attempt to profit by criminality.
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