ng has been a woman at least," said Miss Amory. "I have
been a sort of feminine automaton. I have been respectable and she has
not. All good women are not respectable and all respectable women are not
good. That's a truism so absolute that it is a platitude, and yet there
still exist people to whom it would appear a novel statement. That poor
creature has loved and had her heart broken. She has suffered the whole
gamut of things. She has been a wife without a name, a mother without a
child. She is full of crude tragedy. And I have found out already that
she is good--good."

"What is goodness?" asked Baird.

Miss Amory gave him another of her sharp looks.

"You are drawing me out," she said. "I'm not really worth it. Goodness is
quite different from respectability. Respectability is a strict keeping
of the laws men have made to oblige other men to do or not to do the
things they want done or left undone. The large meaning of the law is
punishment. No law, no punishment; no punishment, no law. And man made
both for man. If you keep man's law you will be respectable, but you may
not be good. Jesus Christ was not respectable--no one will deny that.
Goodness, after all, means doing all kindness to all creatures, and,
above all, doing no wrong to any. That's all. Are you good?"

"No," he answered, "I am not."

"You would probably find it more difficult to be so than I should," she
responded. "And I find it hard enough--without being handicapped by
beauty and the pleasure-loving temperament. You were started well on the
road to the devil when you were born. Your very charms and virtues were
ready to turn out vices in disguise. But when such things happen----" and
she shrugged her lean shoulders. "As we have no one else to dare to
blame, we can only blame ourselves. In a scheme so vague every man must
be his own brake."

Baird drew a sharp breath. "If one only knew that early enough," he
exclaimed.

Miss Amory laughed harshly.

"Yes," she said, "part of the vagueness of the scheme--if it _is_ a
scheme--is that it takes half a lifetime to find it out. Before that, we
are always either telling ourselves that we are not going to do any harm,
or that we are under the guidance of a merciful Providence."

"That we are not going to do any harm," Baird repeated, "that we are not
going to do any harm. And suddenly it's done."

"And can't be undone," Miss Amory added. "That's it."

The girl, Susan Chapman, was watching them