“All people ain’t like me. Then I must be either better or worse than most people. Worse, you could not mean; no, barber, you could not mean that; hardly that. It remains, then, that you think me better than most people. But that I ain’t vain enough to believe; though, from vanity, I confess, I could never yet, by my best wrestlings, entirely free myself; nor, indeed, to be frank, am I at bottom over anxious to—this same vanity, barber, being so harmless, so useful, so comfortable, so pleasingly preposterous a passion.”
“Very true, sir; and upon my honor, sir, you talk very well. But the lather is getting a little cold, sir.”
“Better cold lather, barber, than a cold heart. Why that cold sign? Ah, I don’t wonder you try to shirk the confession. You feel in your soul how ungenerous a hint is there. And yet, barber, now that I look into your eyes—which somehow speak to me of the mother that must have so often looked into them before me—I dare say, though you may not think it, that the spirit of that notification is not one with your nature. For look now, setting, business views aside, regarding the thing in an abstract light; in short, supposing a case, barber; supposing, I say, you see a stranger, his face accidentally averted, but his visible part very respectable-looking; what now, barber—I put it to your conscience, to your charity—what would be your impression of that man, in a moral point of view? Being in a signal sense a stranger, would you, for that, signally set him down for a knave?”
“Certainly not, sir; by no means,” cried the barber, humanely resentful.
“You would upon the face of him——”
“Hold, sir,” said the barber, “nothing about the face; you remember, sir, that is out of sight.”
“I forgot that. Well then, you would, upon the back of him, conclude him to be, not improbably, some worthy sort of person; in short, an honest man: wouldn’t you?”
“Not unlikely I should, sir.”
“Well now—don’t be so impatient with your brush, barber—suppose that honest man meet you by night in some dark corner of the boat where his face would still remain unseen, asking you to trust him for a shave—how then?”
“Wouldn’t trust him, sir.”