"The conscience that's in us—that charming, conversible, infinite thing, the intensest thing we know. But you must treat the oracle civilly if you wish to make it speak. You mustn't stride into the temple in muddy jack-boots and with your hat on your head, as the Puritan troopers tramped into the dear old abbeys. One must do one's best to find out the right, and your criminality appears to be that you've not taken the commonest trouble."
"I hadn't you to ask," smiled Nick. "But duty strikes me as doing something in particular. If you're too afraid it may be the wrong thing you may let everything go."
"Being is doing, and if doing is duty being is duty. Do you follow?"
"At a very great distance."
"To be what one may be, really and efficaciously," Nash went on, "to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it—that's conduct, that's life."
"And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?"
"In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one's out of it—the question doesn't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others. The brute, the ass," Nick's visitor developed, "neither feels nor understands, nor accepts nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that to profit by them we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognise our particular form, the instrument that each of us—each of us who carries anything—carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it in perfection—that's what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success."
Nick listened with friendly attention and the air of general assent was in his face as he said: "Every one has it then, this individual pipe?"
"'Every one,' my dear fellow, is too much to say, for the world's full of the crudest remplissage. The book of life's padded, ah but padded—a deplorable want of editing! I speak of every one who's any one. Of course there are pipes and pipes—little quavering flutes for the concerted movements and big cornets-à-piston for the great solos."
"I see, I see. And what might your instrument be?"