“Look here!” he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of glance and voice.  “If I was going to live, I’d have some funny things to tell.  Six months ago I was a good man.  I not only seemed to be good, to others and to myself, but I was good.  I had a soul; I had a conscience.  I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it.  We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all.  We really were happy; and I—­I really was a good man.  Here’s the kind of joke God plays!  You see me here six months after.  Look at me!  I haven’t got an honest hair in my head.  I’m a bad man through and through, that’s what I am.  I look all around at myself, and there isn’t an atom left anywhere of the good man I used to be.  And, mind you, I never lifted a finger to prevent the change.  I didn’t resist once; I didn’t make any fight.  I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open.  I told myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in my heart that it was a lie.  Everything about me was a lie.  I wouldn’t be telling the truth, even now, if—­if I hadn’t come to the end of my rope.  Now, how do you explain that?  How can it be explained?  Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere?  Was it all a sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one, in just a few months—­in the time that it takes an ear of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew?  Or isn’t there any God at all—­but only men who live and die like animals?  And that would explain my case, wouldn’t it?  I got bitten and went vicious and crazy, and they’ve had to chase me out and hunt me to my death like a mad dog!  Yes, that makes it all very simple.  It isn’t worth while to discuss me at all as if I had a soul, is it?  I’m just one more mongrel cur that’s gone mad, and must be put out of the way.  That’s all.”

“See here,” said Sister Soulsby, alertly, “I half believe that a good cuffing is what you really stand in need of.  Now you stop all this nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still!  Do you hear me?”

The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words and manner, seemed to soothe him.  He almost smiled up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed profoundly.

“I’ve told you my religion before,” she went on with gentleness.  “The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day, but not a minute sooner.  In other words, as long as human life lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up together in every man’s nature, and every woman’s too.  You weren’t altogether good a year ago, any more than you’re altogether bad now.  You were some of both then; you’re some of both now.  If you’ve been making an extra sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now that you recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam, pull up, and back engine in the other direction.  In that way you’ll find things will even themselves up.  It’s a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware—­sometimes up; sometimes down.  But nobody is rotten clear to the core.”