One instance of the compensating payment was
that deaths sometimes became desirable; you had to wish a death sooner
than life-long misery for a friend; to wish it was not wrong, though to
have to wish it might be distasteful. In this self-justification he
contrived to subordinate, while he admitted, his own strong interest in
the death and his violent dislike of the sufferer which robbed the death
of its pain so far as he was concerned. People's infatuation with
Quisante, above all May's infatuation, had so irritated him that he did
not scruple to accept the only means of ending them; that they would be
thus ended it never came into his mind to doubt. His regret was only for
the stretch of delay, for the time of waiting, for the respite promised
to the doomed man if he would be docile and obedient; for all of them
life was passing, and too much had already in tragic mistake been spent
on Alexander Quisante.
"I think you're damnably inhuman," said Dick Benyon, expressing, as he
often did, an unsophisticated but not perhaps an altogether unsound
popular judgment.
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