Tracks in the Snow by Godfrey R. Benson — Read

"Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," is, I do not doubt, a saying which has its truth. Nevertheless, I have generally noticed, when I have read much about murders or other great crimes, or about the social or political misdeeds which are not called crimes, that every piece of additional knowledge about the manner in which the thing was done, the inducements that led to it, the conduct that followed it, has, for me at least, set the capital act of wrong in a more hideous light. It is not, I think, that the picturesque circumstances, like the guttering candle whose image got on my nerves that night, affect me profoundly. It is, I believe, that, while many men, most if you like, are middling, the distinctly bad are really much worse and the distinctly good are really much better than the world of middling people is at all ready to allow. When I looked at the whole circumstances of the crime, as I now conceived them, a great hatred of Vane-Cartwright possessed my soul. There was a passage in my subsequent course with regard to him, when a reason personal to myself had just been added to the cause of my hate, upon which I look back sometimes with self-disgust, but I cannot think that the desire, which first prompted me to fasten myself upon Vane-Cartwright and try to drag him down, was an impure desire, or that it consorted ill with the inner meaning of those precepts which it was my profession to teach.

Whether it was right or wrong, the strength of the feeling which then animated me showed itself in my resolve to think calmly and to act circumspectly. I was conscious that the structure of my theory was held together by no firm rivets of verifiable fact, but by something which must be called feeling. I did not distrust my theory on that account; but I did distrust myself, and I determined, in what lay before me, to take as few impulsive steps and to draw as few impulsive conclusions as I could.