“Yes, Addison,” Doctor Levillier continued, in a low voice, “I am perpetually sitting with sorrow, communing with disease.  That consulting-room of mine is as a pool of Bethesda, only not all who come to it, alas! can be healed.  I sit day by day in my confessional—­I like to call it that; perhaps I was meant to be a priest—­and I read the stories of the lives of men and of women, most of them necessarily, from the circumstances which bring them to me, sad.  And yet I have a belief in joy and its triumph which nothing can ever shake, a belief in the final glory of good which nothing can ever conquer.”

“That’s fine, doctor.  But do you know why you have it?”

“I daresay that question is difficult to answer.  I often seek for my reasons, Addison, and I find many, though I can hardly say which is the best, or whether any quite explains the faith that is always in me. Apropos of this evening, by the bye, I long ago found one of my reasons in the theatre, the theatre which some really good men hate and condemn.”

“What was that?”

“Oh, a very simple one.  I believe that men in the mass express eternal truths more readily, more certainly, than men as individuals.  Put a lot of bad men, or—­we won’t call them bad, why should we?—­loose, careless, thoughtless men, together in the pit of a theatre.  Many of them, perhaps, drink, and are rendered cruel by drink.  Many of them care nothing for morality, and have wounded, in the worst way, the souls of women.  Many of them show incessant hardness in most of the relations of life.  What, then, is it, that makes all these individuals respond so directly, so certainly, to every touch of goodness, and gentleness, and unselfishness, and purity, and faith, that is put before them upon the stage?  I think it must be that eternal truth—­the rocks of good that lie forever beneath the wild seas of evil.  Those men don’t know themselves; don’t know that it is all useless for them to try to hide the nobility which has been put into them, to thrust it down, and, metaphorically, to dance on it.  They can’t get rid of it, do what they will.  I like to think of goodness as the shadow of evil through life, the shadow that, at death, or perhaps long after death, becomes the substance.”

“You think we cannot kill the good that is in us?”

“Not quite.  But I think we can go near to killing it, so near that it will take longer to recover and to be itself again, longer far than the most relapsing typhoid patient.”

“And have you other reasons for your belief?”

“Perhaps.  But some of them are difficult to define, and would carry no conviction to any one but myself.  There is one in this very room with us.”

Julian glanced up, surprised.

“What is that, doctor?” he said.

“You ought to know better than I,” Levillier answered.

He was looking at Valentine, who, apparently quite unconscious of their presence, was still playing rather softly.  Julian followed his eyes.