statesmen, I began to doubt the virtues of my old heroes whose
speeches I had often declaimed with so much unction. I became a cynic.
At twenty-two my thoughts matched the epigrams of Rochefoucauld and my
philosophy that of Schopenhauer. All my old ideas as to the importance
of the work I had chosen and of my own value to the world were quickly
dissipated. Often I had cause to remember the Professor and his
argument that even of our good actions selfishness was the main-spring,
and accepting it as true, and laying bare the roots of my own motives
and of those around me, I should have moved confusedly in the darkness
had I not come to see more clearly what he meant by marching under
sealed orders and to realize that I had a duty and that it was to live
by the light I had. I did try to do this. I had a conscience, and
though I might believe that it was but a group of conceptions as to the
nature of right and wrong poured into my mind by my early instruction,
it protested as strongly against abuse as did my digestive organs.
Sometimes I had to effect strange compromises with it. Sometimes, in
my never ceasing search for facts, I found myself causing pain and
trouble to those who were innocently brought under the shadow of crime
and scandal, but I justified myself by the theory that they suffered
for the good of the many. To me the old dictum that the end justifies
the means became a useful balm.

You might think that, with so radical a change in my ideas, I should
see Gladys Todd in another light than that of my college days. Indeed,
looking back, those college days did seem of another age and another
world, but in them Gladys Todd had become linked to me by ties as
indissoluble as those which bound me to my father and mother. To what
I deemed my broader view of life, their ways of living and their ways
of thinking were certainly exceedingly narrow, but none the less I
thought of them only with reverence and affection. So it was with
Gladys Todd. That mirthful outburst over her effusion about the
crusader was followed by many of its kind as her daily letters came to
me, but this meant simply that I was growing older than she, and she to
my mind became a child, but was none the less lovely for her
unsophistication. In the turmoil of my daily work, in the unlovely
clatter of Miss Minion's boarding-house, I often recalled the vine-clad
veranda and our walks in the grass-grown lane, looked back to them
regretfully,