I will not fill it with a lot of hulking boys. Boys are
naturally rough and coarse animals, and can generally fight their way
out on top, no matter how stiff the struggle. Give me so many graceful
delicate girls; pretty helpless things, dainty little innocent
fascinating creatures; not necessarily fatherless girls, but
unprotected girls--girls that grievously need protection."

And Dale thought how the man, when he was alive, dealt with any
innocent unprotected girl who chanced to fall into his power. In
imagination he saw him taking care of Mavis, when she was young and
tender, and scarcely knew right from wrong. In imagination he saw it
all again--the pattings and pawings, the scheming and devising, the
luring and ensnaring--Barradine and Mavis--the man of many years and
the girl of few years, the serpent and the dove, the destroyer and the
destroyed. Those torturing mental pictures glowed and took form, and
were as vivid now as when, in the hour of his grief and despair, he
first made them and saw them.

This departed saint, whose memory had become as a fragrance of myrrh,
whose name sounded like the clinking of an incense-pot swung by devout
hands, whose monument stood firm as a temple built upon the rock, was
simply a dirty old beast for whom no excuse could be possible. What
worse crime can there be than that of befouling youth? Who is a worse
enemy to the commonweal than he who snatches and steals for his
transient gratification treasures that are accumulating to make some
honest man's life-long joy? Such wanton abuse of society's law and
nature's plan is the unpardonable sin; it is sin as monstrous as the
enormities that brought down fire upon the dwellers in the cities of
the plain.

To Dale the idea of an offense so gross that its perpetrator deserved
neither pity nor mercy was if anything stronger now than when it had
first entered and filled his mind.

Yet it seemed to him that now, after all the years that had gone by,
he could for the first time perfectly understand the dark and shameful
tangle of emotions through which the sinner moved onward to his sin.
It seemed that with luminous clearness he could look right into the
corrupt heart of the dead man. He could understand all, though he
could forgive nothing. He could measure the force of every thought and
sensation that had pushed the dead man on and on.

After middle-age the blood grows stagnant, habit dulls the edge of
appetite, a weariness of the