ht him wise. What was original sin? And if its origin was not
within, where did it originate and how? If the boy had already been
inoculated with the germ of sin, was he conscious of it? And did he
yield to it voluntarily or unconsciously or both? And if unconscious
of sin, was he morally responsible for its commission? These and many
other vexed theological questions flitted anxiously through my mind
and brought me to a careful scrutiny of Jerry's acts as I knew them.
To engage in a prize fight, whatever the prize, whether money or
merely the love of woman, if a venial, was not a mortal sin. To be
sure, anger was a mortal sin and Jerry had yielded to it. Such
fighting as Jerry had done, was not and could not by dint of argument
become a part of any philosophy that I had taught him. He had sinned.
He would sin again. As Miss Gore had said, my dream castle was
tottering--it _had_ tottered and was falling. Jerry, my Perfect Man,
at the first contact with the world felt the contagion of its innate
depravity and corruption. The more I thought of Jerry's character, his
ingenuous belief in the good of all things, the more it seemed to me
that it was only a question of the strength of Jerry's spiritual
health to resist the ravages of spiritual disease. You see, already I
had thrown my philosophy to the winds. For where I had once planned
that Jerry should go through fire unscorched, it was now merely become
a question of the amount of his scorching.

I bade Jack good-by, after hearing of the bad quarter-hour he had
spent with Ballard, Senior, downtown, and made my way to my train for
Horsham Manor in no very happy frame of mind. Had I known what new
phase of Jerry's character was soon to be revealed to me, God knows I
should have been still more unhappy. Jerry was not at the Manor when I
arrived there. For some reasons best known to Marcia Van Wyck and
himself it had been decided to stay for awhile longer in town, and it
was not until over a month later that Jerry arrived bag and baggage in
his machine with Christopher. He greeted me cheerfully enough, but I
was not quite satisfied with his appearance. The marks of his fight
with Clancy had almost, if not quite, disappeared, and while he had
taken on much of his normal weight, he had little color and his eyes
were dull. He smoked cigarettes constantly, lighting one from another,
and on the afternoon and evening of the day of his arrival, sat
moodily frowning at vacancy, or wal