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At the words ‘moral courage’ Steer had righted himself in his seat so suddenly that the Judge was seen to blink. ‘Moral courage!’ Wasn’t anybody going to tell those dodos there that the feller had been playing the rip with that cross-bred slut? Wasn’t anybody going to tell them that Bowden had put his son up to this to spite him—Steer? A sense of mystification and falsity muddled and enraged him; it was all bluff and blarney, like selling a horse....

With the robust common-sense characteristic—counsel went on—of plain and honest men, the jury would realise that one could not have things both ways in this world—however it might be in the next. The sad records of the divorce court showed what was the outcome of hasty and ill-considered marriages. They gave one to think furiously, indeed, whether these actions for breach of promise, with their threat of publicity, were not responsible for much of the work of that dismal tribunal. He would submit that where you had, as here, a young man, admitting his error and regretting it, yet manly enough to face this ordeal in order to save the plaintiff, and in less degree himself, of course, from a life of misery, that young man was entitled if not to credit, at least to just and considerate treatment at the hands of his fellow-citizens, who had themselves all been young and perhaps not always as wise as Solomon. Let them remember what young blood was—a sunny lane in that beautiful Western county, the scent of honeysuckle, a pretty girl—and then let them lay their hands on their hearts and say that they themselves might not have mistaken the emotions of a moment for a lifelong feeling.