suade himself that this was right. Hannah ought not to
throw herself away on Bud Means. Men of some culture always play their
conceit off against their consciences. To a man of literary habits it
usually seems to be a great boon that he confers on a woman when he
gives her his love. Reasoning thus, Ralph had fixed his resolution, and
if the night had been shorter, or sleep possible, the color of his life
might have been changed.

But some time along in the tedious hours came the memory of his
childhood, the words of his mother, the old Bible stories, the
aspiration after nobility of spirit, the solemn resolutions to be true
to his conscience. These angels of the memory came flocking back before
the animal, the bull-doggedness, had "set," as workers in plaster say.
He remembered the story of David and Nathan, and it seemed to him that
he, with all his abilities and ambitions and prospects, was about to rob
Bud of the one ewe-lamb, the only thing he had to rejoice in in his
life. In getting Hannah, he would make himself unworthy of Hannah. And
then there came to him a vision of the supreme value of a true
character; how it was better than success, better than to be loved,
better than heaven. And how near he had been to missing it! And how
certain he was, when these thoughts should fade, to miss it! He was as
one fighting for a great prize who feels his strength failing and is
sure of defeat.

This was the real, awful "Struggle in the Dark." A human soul fighting
with heaven in sight, but certain of slipping inevitably into hell! It
was the same old battle. The Image of God fought with the Image of the
Devil. It was the same fight that Paul described so dramatically when he
represented the Spirit as contending with the Flesh. Paul also called
this dreadful something the Old Adam, and I suppose Darwin would call it
the remains of the Wild Beast. But call it what you will, it is the
battle that every well-endowed soul must fight at some point. And to
Ralph it seemed that the final victory of the Evil, the Old Adam, the
Flesh, the Wild Beast, the Devil, was certain. For, was not the pure,
unconscious face of Hannah on the Devil's side? And so the battle had
just as well be given up at once, for it must be lost in the end.

But to Ralph, lying there in the still darkness, with his conscience as
wide awake as if it were the Day of Doom, there seemed something so
terrible in this overflow of the better nature which he knew to