Faunce agreed with some amusement.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how some men seem to lose their proportion when they stand up? They’re not put together in equal parts.”
“A good many who are put together right outside are out of joint inside.”
“How about the mental proportion—or shall we call it the spiritual?”
“That depends upon how much you follow the dean. A mental twist is pretty nearly certain to go hand in hand with moral lopsidedness, though.”
Faunce reflected on this for a moment, while they made their way under the interlacing branches of the big trees that arched over the country road. It was late in October, and the fall of the leaves had already stripped the big elms and left them in spectral outline against the moonlit sky.
“I take it, then, that you hold a moral shortcoming as a sign of an unbalanced mind?”
“I didn’t say that. That’s the other way around; but it’s true, too, though I shouldn’t cite it as a reason for getting off a criminal. We’ve had a little more of that lately than is good for us.”
“Then you don’t think that the mental condition palliates crime?”
“I think a good many people commit murder or highway robbery, and then, about the time when they get caught, they decide that they must have been crazy.”