“Come, now, that won’t do!” objected Stephen. “You’ve built your door a mile too narrow. I’ve a notion that grass is green, and another that my new boots don’t fit me: whence come they?”
“The first,” said Gerhardt drily, “from the Gospel of Saint Mark; the second from the Fourteenth Psalm.”
“The Fourteenth Psalm makes mention of my boots!”
“Not in detail. It saith, ‘There is none that doeth good,—no, not one.’”
“What on earth has that to do with it?”
“This: that if sin had never entered the world, both fraud and suffering would have tarried outside with it.”
“Well, I always did reckon Father Adam a sorry fellow, that he had no more sense than to give in to his wife.”
“I rather think he gave in to his own inclination, at least as much. If he had not wanted to taste the apple, she might have coaxed till now.”
“Hold hard there, man! You are taking the woman’s side.”
“I thought I was taking the side of truth. If that be not one’s own, it is quite as well to find it out.”