n we try to do right.'

'And you haven't only tried,' Van Torp answered quietly, 'you've done
it.'

'Have I?' It sounded as if she asked the question of herself, or of
some one to whom she appealed in her heart. 'I often wonder,' she
added thoughtfully.

'You needn't worry,' said her companion, more cheerily than he had yet
spoken. 'Do you want to know why I think you needn't fuss about your
conscience and your soul, and things?'

He smiled now, and so did she, but more at the words he used than at
the question itself.

'Yes,' she said. 'I should like to know why.'

'It's a pretty good sign for a lady's soul when a lot of poor
creatures bless her every minute of their lives for fishing them out
of the mud and landing them in a decent life. Come, isn't it now? You
know it is. That's all. No further argument's necessary. The jury is
satisfied and the verdict is that you needn't fuss. So that's that,
and let's talk about something else.'

'I'm not so sure,' Lady Maud answered. 'Is it right to bribe people to
do right? Sometimes it has seemed very like that!'

'I don't set up to be an expert in morality,' retorted Van Torp, 'but
if money, properly used, can prevent murder, I guess that's better
than letting the murder be committed. You must allow that. The
same way with other crimes, isn't it? And so on, down to mere
misdemeanours, till you come to ordinary morality. Now what have you
got to say? If it isn't much better for the people themselves to lead
decent lives just for money's sake, it's certainly much better
for everybody else that they should. That appears to me to be
unanswerable. You didn't start in with the idea of making those poor
things just like you, I suppose. You can't train a cart-horse to win
the Derby. Yet all their nonsense about equality rests on the theory
that you can. You can't make a good judge out of a criminal, no
matter how the criminal repents of his crimes. He's not been born the
intellectual equal of the man who's born to judge him. His mind is
biassed. Perhaps he's a degenerate--everything one isn't oneself is
called degenerate nowadays. It helps things, I suppose. And you can't
expect to collect a lot of poor wretches together and manufacture
first-class Magdalens out of ninety-nine per cent of them, because
you're the one that needs no repentance, can you? I forget whether the
Bible says it was ninety-nine who did or ninety-nine who didn't,
but you'll understand my drift, I dare