For a moment I was appalled by what I had done.  Then I thought of the Harriet I knew so well:  the inexhaustible heart of her.  With a sudden inspiration I opened the kitchen door and we both looked in.  The girl stood motionless just where I left her:  an infinitely pathetic figure.

“Harriet,” I said, “that girl is hungry—­and cold.”

Well, it worked.  Instantly Harriet ceased to be Society-at-Large and became the Harriet I know, the Harriet of infinite compassion for all weak creatures.  When she had gone in I pulled my hat down and went straight for the barn.  I guess I know when it’s wise to be absent from places.

I unharnessed the mare, and watered and fed her; I climbed up into the loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars.  And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky.  No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, how feeble his judgments.

And I thought as I stood there how many a man, deep down in his heart, knows to a certainty that he has escaped being an outcast, not because of any real moral strength or resolution of his own, but because Society has bolstered him up, hedged him about with customs and restrictions until he never has had a really good opportunity to transgress.  And some do not sin for very lack of courage and originality:  they are helplessly good.  How many men in their vanity take to themselves credit for the built-up virtues of men who are dead!  There is no cause for surprise when we hear of a “foremost citizen,” the “leader in all good works,” suddenly gone wrong; not the least cause for surprise.  For it was not he that was moral, but Society.  Individually he had never been tested, and when the test came he fell.  It will give us a large measure of true wisdom if we stop sometimes when we have resisted a temptation and ask ourselves why, at that moment, we did right and not wrong.  Was it the deep virtue, the high ideals in our souls, or was it the compulsion of the Society around us?  And I think most of us will be astonished to discover what fragile persons we really are—­in ourselves.

I stopped for several minutes at the kitchen door before I dared to go in.  Then I stamped vigorously on the boards, as if I had come rushing up to the house without a doubt in my mind—­I even whistled—­and opened the door jauntily.  And had my pains for nothing!

The kitchen was empty, but full of comforting and homelike odours.  There was undoubtedly hot mush in the kettle.  A few minutes later Harriet came down the stairs.  She held up one finger warningly.  Her face was transfigured.

“David,” she whispered, “the baby’s asleep.”

So I tiptoed across the room.  She tiptoed after me.  Then I faced about, and we both stood there on our tiptoes, holding our breath—­at least I held mine.