"So you see I confess"--he went on with laborious distinctness--
"I confess that all the people who called our duel mad were right
in a way. I would confess it to old Cumberland Vane and his
eye-glass. I would confess it even to that old ass in brown
flannel who talked to us about Love. Yes, they are right in a
way. I am a little mad."

He stopped and wiped his brow as if he were literally doing heavy
labour. Then he went on:

"I am a little mad; but, after all, it is only a little madness.
When hundreds of high-minded men had fought duesl about a jostle
with the elbow or the ace of spades, the whole world need not
have gone wild over my one little wildness. Plenty of other
people have killed themselves between then and now. But all
England has gone into captivity in order to take us captive. All
England has turned into a lunatic asylum in order to prove us
lunatics. Compared with the general public, I might positively be
called sane."

He stopped again, and went on with the same air of travailing
with the truth:

"When I saw that, I saw everything; I saw the Church and the
world. The Church in its earthly action has really touched morbid
things--tortures and bleeding visions and blasts of
extermination. The Church has had her madnesses, and I am one of
them. I am the massacre of St. Bartholomew. I am the Inquisition
of Spain. I do not say that we have never gone mad, but I say