, the vices so
repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so
shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out
of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them."

The second friend drew a long breath. "Then I don't see why there are so
many."

"Well," the first friend suggested, "there seems to be a difficulty.
Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on
without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we
shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or
accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good."

"I don't see how you make that out."

"Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does
not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in
the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not
need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very
imperfect."

"And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing
our duty?"

"Well, we sha'n't by not doing it."

XVII

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY

The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving
conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay
him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to
greater circumstance in him. He said:

"It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance or
design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind
openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe
anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was
prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked
about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not
deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary
of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence,
I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he
had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother,
and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname
was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued
my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered
menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was
Brown, Jones, or Robinson."

"We dare say you have your self-just