nguish the dark chief of the Manichaeans when he talks
our own thoughts to us?

Further he whispered, "And your System:--if you would be brave to the
world, have courage to cast the dream of it out of you: relinquish an
impossible project; see it as it is--dead: too good for men!"

"Ay!" muttered the baronet: "all who would save them perish on the
Cross!"

And so he sat nursing the devil.

By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to
gaze at Ripton. That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny
slept a dead sleep. A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his
helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him
look absurdly piteous. The baronet remembered how often he had compared
his boy with this one: his own bright boy! And where was the difference
between them?

"Mere outward gilding!" said his familiar.

"Yes," he responded, "I daresay this one never positively plotted to
deceive his father: he followed his appetites unchecked, and is
internally the sounder of the two."

Ripton, with his sunken chin and snoring nose under the light of the
lamp, stood for human nature, honest, however abject.

"Miss Random, I fear very much, is a necessary establishment!" whispered
the monitor.

"Does the evil in us demand its natural food, or it corrupts the whole?"
ejaculated Sir Austin. "And is no angel of avail till that is drawn off?
And is that our conflict--to see whether we can escape the contagion of
its embrace, and come uncorrupted out of that?"

"The world is wise in its way," said the voice.

"Though it look on itself through Port wine?" he suggested, remembering
his lawyer Thompson.

"Wise in not seeking to be too wise," said the voice.

"And getting intoxicated on its drug of comfort!"

"Human nature is weak."

"And Miss Random is an establishment, and Wild Oats an institution!"

"It always has been so."

"And always will be?"

"So I fear! in spite of your very noble efforts."

"And leads--whither? And ends--where?"

Richard's laugh, taken up by horrid reverberations, as it were through
the lengths of the Lower Halls, replied.

This colloquy of two voices in a brain was concluded by Sir Austin asking
again if there were no actual difference between the flower of his hopes
and yonder drunken weed, and receiving for answer that there was a
decided dissimilarity in the smell of the couple; becoming cognizant of
which he retreated.