"And suppose they would not," pursued Miss Gastonguay.
"They would change, dear Miss Gastonguay. I am sure they would, but if there were some who were very bad I would have a nice little prison for them where they would be happy, but that they could never get out of."
Miss Gastonguay smiled grimly, and turned to Chelda. "And you, my niece, what would you do?"
Chelda's soul was steeped in the very bitterness of hatred as she surveyed the compassionate face beyond her, but she gave no outward sign of it, and responded with her usual composure, "Such people all seem like vipers to me. They are not of our kind. I should not allow one to run loose, not one. I would severely isolate them so that they might not bite me."
"You are wrong—wrong!" interposed Derrice. "They are like ourselves. They are not different. Once when I was going along a street in New York with my father I saw a poor man being arrested. My father said—"
She stopped short, overpowered not by the remembrance of the criminal, but by her loss of the dear companionship of former days.
"Well, what did your father say?" asked Miss Gastonguay, in a hard, dry voice.
"He said," Derrice continued, with difficulty, "he said, 'They have got the wrong man.' I tried to drag him forward to tell the policeman, but he held me back. 'You can't get the real criminal,' he told me. 'Probably you would have to dig him out of some grave. This man is what his parents have made him.'"
"Now that is not so," said Miss Gastonguay, angrily, "that is nothing but a lie. I say degeneracy is innate in some mortals. Nothing takes it out."
Derrice scarcely heard her. "My father went on to tell me," she continued, in a dreamy voice, "of a man he once knew who did not want to be bad. There was something in him striving, protesting, fighting with evil, but he had no powers of resistance. He said that the man had had a father who indulged him, and a mother to whom his wish was law, because he was her youngest child. I can remember my father's very words,—he said that the child was encouraged to trample on domestic law, and when he grew up he could not keep the public law. It was a very sad case, for my father almost broke down when he told me of the spoiled boy grown up and going raging out into the world. He said he was lost, hopelessly lost, and I cried dismally, for my father said that I might have met him, or if not him, many another like him, in the throngs of people in great cities. Would you call that young man a viper?" and she turned to Chelda.