Eleanor, he said earnestly, "it is not I who choose. There is no choice! Your friend downstairs would say, 'Tell me all that you know of a certain matter, and the sentence which has been passed upon you shall be held over.' But when I had told him, when he knew everything, no agreement, no promise, could possibly be binding. I could not myself expect it. In his place I should make very sure that in a matter of hours I was a dead man. I say that myself, whose whole life has been sacrificed to a matter in which honor was largely concerned."