He had found
fault with her--so he mused--HE! And what could he say for himself?
When she built her first church what was he doing? Gathering other
blase multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace
with it; losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting,
and sillily vain of the admiring notoriety it made for him.
When she was building her first university, what was he doing?
Polluting himself with a gay and dissipated secret life in the
company of other fast bloods, multimillionaires in money and paupers
in character. When she was building her first foundling asylum,
what was he doing? Alas! When she was projecting her noble Society
for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing? Ah, what, indeed!
When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet,
moving with resistless march, were sweeping the fatal bottle from
the land, what was he doing? Getting drunk three times a day.
When she, builder of a hundred cathedrals, was being gratefully
welcomed and blest in papal Rome and decorated with the Golden Rose
which she had so honorably earned, what was he doing? Breaking the
bank at Monte Carlo.
He stopped. He could go no farther; he could not bear the rest.
He rose up, with a great resolution upon his lips: this secret
life should be revealing, and confessed; no longer would he live
it clandestinely, he would go and tell her All.
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