he
encountered take care of themselves. Those he dealt with were to him
rather as enemies than friends--not enemies to be prayed for, but to be
spoiled. Malcolm's doctrine of honesty in horse-dealing was to him
ludicrously new. His notion of honesty in that kind was to cheat the buyer
for his master if he could, proud to write in his book a large sum against
the name of the animal. He would have scorned in his very soul the idea of
making a farthing by it himself through any business quirk whatever, but
he would not have been the least ashamed if, having sold Kelpie, he had
heard--let me say after a week of possession--that she had dashed out her
purchaser's brains. He would have been a little shocked, a little sorry
perhaps, but nowise ashamed. "By this time," he would have said, "the man
ought to have been up to her, and either taken care of himself or _sold
her again_"--to dash out another man's brains instead!

That the bastard Malcolm, or the ignorant and indeed fallen fisher-girl
Lizzy, should judge differently, nowise troubled him: what could they know
about the rights and wrongs of business? The fact which Lizzy sought to
bring to bear upon him, that our Lord would not have done such a thing,
was to him no argument at all. He said to himself, with the superior smile
of arrogated common sense, that "no mere man since the fall" could be
expected to do like Him; that He was divine, and had not to fight for a
living; that He set us an example that we might see what sinners we were;
that religion was one thing, and a very proper thing, but business was
another, and a very proper thing also--with customs, and indeed laws, of
its own far more determinate, at least definite, than those of religion;
and that to mingle the one with the other was not merely absurd--it was
irreverent and wrong, and certainly never intended in the Bible, which
must surely be common sense. It was _the Bible_ always with him--never
_the will of Christ_. But although he could dispose of the question thus
satisfactorily, yet, as he lay ill, supine, without any distracting
occupation, the thing haunted him. Now, in his father's cottage had lain,
much dabbled in of the children, a certain boardless copy of the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, round in the face and hollow in the back, in which,
amongst other pictures, was one of the Wicket-gate. This scripture of his
childhood, given by inspiration of God, threw out, in one of his troubled
and feverish nights,