Miss Amory came back to earth with a curious look in her eyes.
“Yes,” she answered, “I should think that perhaps you are one of those who know. But one has to have been desperate before one turns to it as a resource. It’s a last one—and the unmerciful powers only know why we should feel it a resource at all. As I said, it does not answer back. And we want answers—answers.”
Then they went on walking.
“That poor thing has been a woman at least,” said Miss Amory. “I have been a sort of feminine automaton. I have been respectable and she has not. All good women are not respectable and all respectable women are not good. That’s a truism so absolute that it is a platitude, and yet there still exist people to whom it would appear a novel statement. That poor creature has loved and had her heart broken. She has suffered the whole gamut of things. She has been a wife without a name, a mother without a child. She is full of crude tragedy. And I have found out already that she is good—good.”
“What is goodness?” asked Baird.
Miss Amory gave him another of her sharp looks.
“You are drawing me out,” she said. “I’m not really worth it. Goodness is quite different from respectability. Respectability is a strict keeping of the laws men have made to oblige other men to do or not to do the things they want done or left undone. The large meaning of the law is punishment. No law, no punishment; no punishment, no law. And man made both for man. If you keep man’s law you will be respectable, but you may not be good. Jesus Christ was not respectable—no one will deny that. Goodness, after all, means doing all kindness to all creatures, and, above all, doing no wrong to any. That’s all. Are you good?”
“No,” he answered, “I am not.”
“You would probably find it more difficult to be so than I should,” she responded. “And I find it hard enough—without being handicapped by beauty and the pleasure-loving temperament. You were started well on the road to the devil when you were born. Your very charms and virtues were ready to turn out vices in disguise. But when such things happen——” and she shrugged her lean shoulders. “As we have no one else to dare to blame, we can only blame ourselves. In a scheme so vague every man must be his own brake.”
Baird drew a sharp breath. “If one only knew that early enough,” he exclaimed.