No one ever had cared for him, he said, but he never asked himself if he ever had permitted any one to care for him. With this outlook on life, a semi-poetical nature, and passions that slept long and deeply only to awake rejuvenated and with the strength of demons, he might before this have gone entirely to the devil, only for a lodger he had.
An old Scotch ancestor lived with him. This “pairson,” who had once worn a long upper lip and had been a writer to the signet, a just, hard, God-fearing, and straight man, had a chamber in a convolution of Leslie’s brain, where he sat—he, or his attenuated personality—twiddling his thumbs like a night watchman and waiting for alarms.
It was this gentleman who had saved his descendant from the weak man’s form of suicide—drink.
He now came out in his old carpet slippers and read his descendant a lecture on the text: “Thou shalt not lust after another man’s wife.”
And he spoke hard and strong, taking almost entirely the “wumman’s” side of the question; pointing out that society, as we know it, imperfect as it may be, is ruled by a number of laws whose aim is the common weal and the individual’s comfort and happiness.
He pointed out that the life of a “wumman” is composed, not of grand passions and Italian opera scenes, but of a hundred thousand trifles, each one insignificant enough, yet each helping to form that grand masterpiece, a pure woman’s life.
That a woman might be pure in mind, even if married to a “red-headed runt” like George du Telle. That if that was so she was a happy woman, and that if a man loved her, loved he never so madly, it would be a strange expression of that love to blast her happiness, and soil her soul.
It would not be love, but lust—the passion of those devils which Mr. Channing had hinted at that evening, those people of the night who slumber not nor sleep.
Having finished, he went into his chamber and shut the door.
And Leslie lay reflecting on his words, also on the words of Channing.