may come to you; but this thing alone of
all things you cannot steal, nor can it be given to you by the County
Council. It cannot be communicated, and yet you may get it. It is
unspeakable but not unthinkable, and it is born as certainly and
unaccountably as you were yourself, and is of just as little immediate
consequence. Long, long ago in the dim beginnings of the world there
was a careless and gay young man who said--"Let truth go to hell"--and
it went there. It was his misfortune that he had to follow it; it is
ours that we are his descendants. An evil will either kill you or be
killed by you, and (the reflection is comforting) the odds are with us
in every fight waged against humanity by the dark or elemental beings.
But humanity is timid and lazy, a believer in golden means and
subterfuges and compromises, loath to address itself to any combat
until its frontiers are virtually overrun and its cities and granaries
and places of refuge are in jeopardy from those gloomy marauders. In
that wide struggle which we call Progress, evil is always the
aggressor and the vanquished, and it is right that this should be so,
for without its onslaughts and depredations humanity might fall to a
fat slumber upon its corn sacks and die snoring: or, alternatively,
lacking these valorous alarms and excursions it might become
self-satisfied and formularized, and be crushed to death by the mere
dull density of virtue. Next to good the most valuable factor in life
is evil. By the interaction of these all things are possible, and,
therefore (or for any other reason that pleases you) let us wave a
friendly hand in the direction of that bold, bad policeman whose
thoughts were not governed by the Book of Regulations which is issued
to all recruits, and who, in despite of the fact that he was enrolled
among the very legions of order, had that chaos in his soul which may
"give birth to a Dancing Star."

As to Mary--even ordinary, workaday politeness frowns on too abrupt a
departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus
distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally
careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world is all before
her, and her chronicler may not be her guide. She will have adventures,
for everybody has. She will win through with them, for everybody does.
She may even meet bolder and badder men than the policeman--Shall we
then detain her? I, for one, having urgent calls elsewhere,