repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable."

"Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair
of priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final
so far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned.
What his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his
fellow-men require of him is another. The world says, You shall have
latitude enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code.
As soon as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public
penalty in motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is
concerned. You may live on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and
broken you always will be. It is not a question of right or wrong, of
kindness or cruelty, but of general expediency and inevitableness. To
all effect, Mr. Anson was dead before he breathed his last. He died when
he passed within the walls of a gaol--condemned for theft."

There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face. To this hour, knowing
all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement
of nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not
so much by impulse as by the law of her nature. Her emotions were
apparently rationalised at birth--to be derationalised and broken up by
a power greater than herself before her life had worked itself out. I
had counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers of reasoning.
Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I resorted to a
personal application of my opinions--the last and most unfair resort of
a disputant. I said I would rather be Anson dead than Mrs. Anson living;
I would rather be the active than the passive sinner; the victim, than a
part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.

"The passive sinner!" she replied. "Why, what wrong did she do?"

The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her. Yet she seemed then,
as she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
machine of penalty going against herself. She was inexorable, but she
had never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral cod