“And so does penance for the sins of his youth, as some of us are to do in the next world?”

“Perhaps yes; perhaps no; perhaps neither.”

“Do you speak of us, or the barnacle?”

“Of both.”

“I am glad of that; for on the popular notion of our being punished a million years hence for what we did when we were lads, I never could see anything but a misery and injustice in our having come into the world at all.”

“I can,” said the Major quietly.

“Of course I meant nothing rude:  but I had to buy my experience, and paid for it dearly enough in folly.”

“So had I to buy mine.”

“Then why be punished over and above?  Why have to pay for the folly, which was itself only the necessary price of experience’?”

“For being, perhaps, so foolish as not to use the experience after it has cost you so dear.”

“And will punishment cure me of the foolishness?”

“That depends on yourself.  If it does, it must needs be so much the better for you.  But perhaps you will not be punished, but forgiven.”

“Let off?  That would be a very bad thing for me, unless I become a very different man from what I have been as yet.  I am always right glad now to get a fall whenever I make a stumble.  I should have gone to sleep in my tracks long ago else, as one to do in the back woods on a long elk hunt.”

“Perhaps you may become a very different man.”

“I should be sorry for that, even if it were possible.”

“Why?  Do you consider yourself perfect?”

“No....  But somehow, Thomas Thurnall is an old friend of mine, the first I ever had; and I should be sorry to lose his company.”

“I don’t think you need fear doing so.  You have seen an insect go through strange metamorphoses, and yet remain the same individual; why should not you and I do so likewise?”

“Well?”

“Well—­There are some points about you, I suppose, which you would not be sorry to have altered?”

“A few,” quoth Tom, laughing.  “I do not consider myself quite perfect yet.”

“What if those points were not really any part of your character, but mere excrescences of disease:  or if that be too degrading a notion, mere scars of old wounds, and of the wear and tear of life; and what if, in some future life, all those disappeared, and the true Mr. Thomas Thurnall, pure and simple, were alone left?”

“It is a very hopeful notion.  Only, my dear sir, one is quite self-conceited enough in this imperfect state.  What intolerable coxcombs we should all be if we were perfect, and could sit admiring ourselves for ever and ever!”

“But what if that self-conceit and self-dependence were the very root of all the disease, the cause of all the scars, the very thing which will have to be got rid of, before our true character and true manhood can be developed?”

“Yes, I understand.  Faith and humility....  You will forgive me, Major Campbell.  I shall learn to respect those virtues when good people have defined them a little more exactly, and can show me somewhat more clearly in what faith differs from superstition, and humility from hypocrisy.”