“Selfishness,” he continued, “is merely another name for Will.  Every deed, good or bad, that we do is prompted by selfishness.  We are charitable to secure ourselves a good place in the next world, to make ourselves respected in this, to ease our own distress at the knowledge of suffering.  One man is kind because it gives him pleasure to be kind, just as another is cruel because cruelty pleases him.  A great man does his duty because to him the sense of duty done is a deeper delight than would be the case resulting from avoidance of duty.  The religious man is religious because he finds a joy in religion; the moral man moral because with his strong self-respect, viciousness would mean wretchedness.  Self-sacrifice itself is only a subtle selfishness:  we prefer the mental exaltation gained thereby to the sensual gratification which is the alternative reward.  Man cannot be anything else but selfish.  Selfishness is the law of all life.  Each thing, from the farthest fixed star to the smallest insect crawling on the earth, fighting for itself according to its strength; and brooding over all, the Eternal, working for Himself:  that is the universe.”

“Have some whisky,” said MacShaughnassy; “and don’t be so complicatedly metaphysical.  You make my head ache.”

“If all action, good and bad, spring from selfishness,” replied Brown, “then there must be good selfishness and bad selfishness:  and your bad selfishness is my plain selfishness, without any adjective, so we are back where we started.  I say selfishness—­bad selfishness—­is the root of all evil, and there you are bound to agree with me.”

“Not always,” persisted Jephson; “I’ve known selfishness—­selfishness according to the ordinarily accepted meaning of the term—­to be productive of good actions.  I can give you an instance, if you like.”

“Has it got a moral?” asked MacShaughnassy, drowsily,

Jephson mused a moment.  “Yes,” he said at length; “a very practical moral—­and one very useful to young men.”

“That’s the sort of story we want,” said the MacShaughnassy, raising himself into a sitting position.  “You listen to this, Brown.”

Jephson seated himself upon a chair, in his favourite attitude, with his elbows resting upon the back, and smoked for a while in silence.

“There are three people in this story,” he began; “the wife, the wife’s husband, and the other man.  In most dramas of this type, it is the wife who is the chief character.  In this case, the interesting person is the other man.

“The wife—­I met her once:  she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, and the most wicked-looking; which is saying a good deal for both statements.  I remember, during a walking tour one year, coming across a lovely little cottage.  It was the sweetest place imaginable.  I need not describe it.  It was the cottage one sees in pictures, and reads of in sentimental poetry.  I was leaning over the neatly-cropped hedge, drinking in its beauty, when at one of the tiny casements I saw, looking out at me, a face.  It stayed there only a moment, but in that moment the cottage had become ugly, and I hurried away with a shudder.