Not that Vance Corliss was anybody’s fool, nor that his had been an anchorite’s existence; but that his upbringing, rather, had given his life a certain puritanical bent.  Awakening intelligence and broader knowledge had weakened the early influence of an austere mother, but had not wholly eradicated it.  It was there, deep down, very shadowy, but still a part of him.  He could not get away from it.  It distorted, ever so slightly, his concepts of things.  It gave a squint to his perceptions, and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned, determined his classifications.  He prided himself on his largeness when he granted that there were three kinds of women.  His mother had only admitted two.  But he had outgrown her.  It was incontestable that there were three kinds,—­the good, the bad, and the partly good and partly bad.  That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly.  In its very nature such a condition could not be permanent.  It was the intermediary stage, marking the passage from high to low, from best to worst.

All of which might have been true, even as he saw it; but with definitions for premises, conclusions cannot fail to be dogmatic.  What was good and bad?  There it was.  That was where his mother whispered with dead lips to him.  Nor alone his mother, but divers conventional generations, even back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from the soil and looked down.  For Vance Corliss was many times removed from the red earth, and, though he did not know it, there was a clamor within him for a return lest he perish.

Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited definitions.  He refused to classify her at all.  He did not dare.  He preferred to pass judgment later, when he had gathered more data.  And there was the allurement, the gathering of the data; the great critical point where purity reaches dreamy hands towards pitch and refuses to call it pitch—­till defiled.  No; Vance Corliss was not a cad.  And since purity is merely a relative term, he was not pure.  That there was no pitch under his nails was not because he had manicured diligently, but because it had not been his luck to run across any pitch.  He was not good because he chose to be, because evil was repellant; but because he had not had opportunity to become evil.  But from this, on the other hand, it is not to be argued that he would have gone bad had he had a chance.

He was a product of the sheltered life.  All his days had been lived in a sanitary dwelling; the plumbing was excellent.  The air he had breathed had been mostly ozone artificially manufactured.  He had been sun-bathed in balmy weather, and brought in out of the wet when it rained.  And when he reached the age of choice he had been too fully occupied to deviate from the straight path, along which his mother had taught him to creep and toddle, and along which he now proceeded to walk upright, without thought of what lay on either side.