he nodded. "It isn't the money," she said at last. "Though I
can't see where it will come from. Nor the marriage, but the perpetual
disgrace. It goes on increasing. We are all bad, worn out; dear old
grandpapa was the last good one. It is what you call a curse, a
disintegration. Why struggle? If we could all go to sleep and sleep it
off? There is nothing ahead, nothing ahead!"

"That is folly," Thornton explained. "We have all been held in thrall
by this curse of heredity. It has been talked at us, and written at
us, and proved to us, until it makes us cowards!"

She looked at him sadly.

"'The sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation,'" she
repeated.

"Damn!" He rose excitedly. "That is the most awful doctrine in the
Bible, and we have believed it like sheep until we really make it
true. When a weak man wants to go to thunder, he thinks of an uncle
who was a drunkard, or a father who was a thief, and he goes and does
likewise. Naturally! And now science comes along and says it isn't so,
or at any rate there is strong doubt about it. In a few years we may
prove that it isn't so and free mankind from that superstitious
curse."

The girl comprehended him but half. "Why, I think that old grandfather
Roper must have been a very passionate man, who fought against himself
and conquered."

"Yes," Thornton admitted, "there was a lot of vice bottled up among
the Puritan saints. It has been spilling out ever since, but that
makes no difference," he went on vehemently to explain his theories.
Somehow, now that his heart was touched, he put passion and conviction
into what his sober reason held as speculation. He made clear to her
the newest theories from Germany. He had come out as a diplomat in a
distasteful cause; he became a pleader full of conviction. His
imagination woke into a flame, and he saw anew, vitally, all the old
problems that he had handled coldly in the laboratory. The woman sat
dumbly, sucking in his statements and arguments. Then, as they stood
on the grass waiting for Pete to bring up his nag, she said:

"We are free, you think." Her mind was laboring with his words.

"In a large measure, we can start fresh: the die is not cast
beforehand." He added less warmly.

"But we copy what is about us. If we can't escape from what you call
the current of ideals we are born in, what difference does it make? It
amounts to the same thing!"

She, the woman, pleaded with him, the man, to free her,