e the other fellows stood by grinning. You
closed the door softly--you thought I never saw you. I was not praying,
I was trying to pray."

"It showed that you had pluck, if it showed nothing else," I answered.
"Most boys would not have tried, and you kept it up."

"Ah, yes," he answered, "I promised the Mater I would, and I did. Poor
old soul, she was as big a fool as you are. She believed in me. Don't
you remember, finding me one Saturday afternoon all alone, stuffing
myself with cake and jam?"

I laughed at the recollection, though Heaven knows I was in no laughing
mood. I had found him with an array of pastry spread out before him,
sufficient to make him ill for a week, and I had boxed his ears, and had
thrown the whole collection into the road.

"The Mater gave me half-a-crown a week for pocket-money," he continued,
"and I told the fellows I had only a shilling, so that I could gorge
myself with the other eighteenpence undisturbed. Pah! I was a little
beast even in those days!"

"It was only a schoolboy trick," I argued, "it was natural enough."

"Yes," he answered, "and this is only a man's trick, and is natural
enough; but it is going to ruin my life, to turn me into a beast instead
of a man. Good God! do you think I don't know what that woman will do
for me? She will drag me down, down, down, to her own level. All my
ideas, all my ambition, all my life's work will be bartered for a smug
practice, among paying patients. I shall scheme and plot to make a big
income that we may live like a couple of plump animals, that we may dress
ourselves gaudily and parade our wealth. Nothing will satisfy her. Such
women are leeches; their only cry is 'give, give, give.' So long as I
can supply her with money she will tolerate me, and to get it for her I
shall sell my heart, and my brain, and my soul. She will load herself
with jewels, and go about from house to house, half naked, to leer at
every man she comes across: that is 'life' to such women. And I shall
trot behind her, the laughing stock of every fool, the contempt of every
man."

His vehemence made any words I could say sound weak before they were
uttered. What argument could I show stronger than that he had already
put before himself? I knew his answer to everything I could urge.

My mistake had been in imagining him different from other men. I began
to see that he was like the rest of us: part angel, part devil. But the
new point he revea