“To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours….Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes…the hint will come.” And when it does come, “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”*3 It is by these subtle means that people who are “not yet very bad” can be drawn to “do very bad things”—by which
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