“All acting!” Paula put in.

“But there was no audience, dear friend.  Orion would not have got up such a performance for his mother and little Mary.”

“But he is a poet—­and a highly-gifted one too.  He sings beautiful songs of his own invention to the lyre; his ecstatic and versatile mind works him up into any frame of feeling; but his soul is perverted; it is soaked in wickedness as a sponge drinks up water.  He is a vessel full of beautiful gifts, but he has forfeited all that was good and noble in him—­all!”

The words came in eager haste from her indignant lips.  Her cheeks glowed with her vehemence, and she thought she had won over the physician; but he gravely shook his head, and said: 

“Your righteous anger carries you too far.  How often have you blamed me for severity and suspicions but now I have to beg you to allow me to ask your sympathy for an experience to which you would probably have raised no objection the day before yesterday: 

“I have met with evil-doers of every degree.  Think, for instance, how many cases of wilful poisoning I have had to investigate.”

“Even Homer called Egypt the land of poison,” exclaimed Paula.  “And it seems almost incredible that Christianity has not altered it in the least.  Kosmas, who had seen the whole earth, could nowhere find more malice, deceit, hatred, and ill-will than exist here.”

“Then you see in what good schools my experience of the wickedness of men has ripened,” said Philippus smiling, “and they have taught me chiefly that there is never a criminal, a sinner, or a scapegrace, however infamous he may be, however cruel or lost to virtue, in whom some good quality or other may not be discovered.—­Do you remember Nechebt, the horrible woman who poisoned her two brothers and her own father?  She was captured scarcely three weeks ago; and that very monster in human form could almost die of hunger and thirst for the sake of her rascally son, who is a common soldier in the imperial army; at last she took to concocting poisons, not to improve her own wretched condition, but to send the shameless wretch means for a fresh debauch.  I have known a thousand similar cases, but I will only mention that of one of the wildest and blood-thirstiest of robbers, who had evaded the vigilance of the watch again and again, but at last fell into their hands—­and how?  Because he had heard that his old mother was ill and he longed to see the withered old woman once more and give her a kiss, since he was her own child!  In the same way Orion, however reprobate we may think him, has at any rate one characteristic which we must approve of:  a tender affection for his father and mother.  Your sponge is not utterly steeped in wickedness; there are still some pores, some cells which resist it; and if in him, as in so many others, the heart is one of them, then I say hopefully, like Horace the Roman:  ‘Nil desperandum.’  It would be unjust to give him up altogether for lost.”