It is a dangerous thing to change environments for the worse. It is more dangerous still to break down the moral barrier, however frail it may be, which our conscience has built between the good and the evil in us. Some, reared under laws that are loose, may withstand this barrier breaking and be no worse for the change; but in the case of those with whom this barrier of their moral belief stands securely between conscience and forbidden paths, let it fall, and all the best of them will fall with it.
For with them there are no degrees in degradation—no caste in the world of sin. Headlong they rush to moral ruin. And there are those like Helen Conway, too blinded by the environment of birth to know that work is not degradation. To them it is the lowering of every standard of their lives, standards which idleness has erected. And idleness builds strange standards.
If it had occurred to Helen Conway—if she had been reared to know that to work honestly for an honest living was the noblest thing in life, how different would it all have been!
And so at last what is right and what is wrong depend more upon what has gone before than what follows after. It is more a question of pedigree and environment than of trials and temptations.
“I shall steal,” she repeated—“oh, I know I shall.”
And yet, as her father drove her in the old shambling buggy across the hill road to the town, there stood out in her mind one other picture which lingered there all day and for many days. She could not forget it nor cast it from her, and in spite of all her sorrow it uplifted her as she had been uplifted at times before when, reading the country newspaper, there had blossomed among its dry pages the perfume of a stray poem, whose incense entered into her soul of souls.
It was a young man in his shirt sleeves, his face flushed with work, his throat bare, plowing on the slope of the hillside for the fall sowing of wheat.
What a splendid picture he was, silhouetted in the rising sun against the pink and purple background of sunbeams!
It was Clay Westmore, and he waved his hand in his slow, calm forceful way as he saw her go by.
It was a little thing, but it comforted her. She remembered it long.