ell, unless one is almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for
one. It takes stuff, within one, so far as one's decency is concerned,
to stand it. And nobody," Charlotte continued in the same manner, "is
decent enough, good enough, to stand it--not without help from religion,
or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting--that is
without taking great care. Certainly," she said, "such people as you and
I are not."

The Prince, obligingly, thought an instant. "Not good enough to stand
it?"

"Well, not good enough not rather to feel the strain. We happen each, I
think, to be of the kind that are easily spoiled."

Her friend, again, for propriety, followed the argument. "Oh, I don't
know. May not one's affection for her do something more for one's
decency, as you call it, than her own generosity--her own affection, HER
'decency'--has the unfortunate virtue to undo?"

"Ah, of course it must be all in that."

But she had made her question, all the same, interesting to him. "What
it comes to--one can see what you mean--is the way she believes in one.
That is if she believes at all."

"Yes, that's what it comes to," said Charlotte Stant.

"And why," he asked, almost soothingly, "should it be terrible?" He
couldn't, at the worst, see that.

"Because it's always so--the idea of having to pity people."

"Not when there's also, with it, the idea of helping them."

"Yes, but if we can't help them?"

"We CAN--we always can. That is," he competently added, "if we care for
them. And that's what we're talking about."

"Yes"--she on the whole assented. "It comes back then to our absolutely
refusing to be spoiled."

"Certainly. But everything," the Prince laughed as they went on--"all
your 'decency,' I mean--comes back to that."

She walked beside him a moment. "It's just what _I_ meant," she then
reasonably said.

VI

The man in the little shop in which, well after this, they lingered
longest, the small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street who
was remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was
mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive--this personage fixed
on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes and looked from one to the
other while they considered the object with which he appeared mainly to
hope to tempt them. They had come to him last, for their time was nearly
up; an hour of it at least, from the moment of their getting int