d I certainly always do."

"What, always?"

"Well, nearly always."

The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the
Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any
longer without the risk of not being followed."

The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went
out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."

"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is
anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from

'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'

it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined
as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology."

"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything
else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D.
C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both
owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of
another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she
stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have
wished to do and tried to do.'"

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first
said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or
don't try hard enough."

The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength;
wickedness is weakness."

"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many
cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."

"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"

"Well, your Stoics--"

"_My_ Stoics?"

"_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure
coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and
let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a
duty coming they stepped out and did it."

"It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?"

"That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But
perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't
have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in
some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented
the Christian ideal of duty."

"And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity
in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear
of punishment has gone. It seems