“Thank you; there won't be any next time. But do you consider the world such a school of morals; then? I supposed it was a very bad place.”
“We seem to have been all born into it,” said the father. He lifted his arms from the fence, and Dan mechanically followed him into the stable. A warm, homely smell of hay and of horses filled the place; a lantern glimmered, a faint blot, in the loft where Pat was pitching some hay forward to the edge of the boards; the naphtha gas weakly flared from the jets beside the harness-room, whence a smell of leather issued and mingled with the other smell. The simple, earthy wholesomeness of the place appealed to Dan and comforted him. The hay began to tumble from the loft with a pleasant rustling sound.
His father called up to Pat, “I think you'd better take the horses in now.”
“Yes, sir: I've got the box-stalls ready for 'em.”
Dan remembered how he and Eunice used to get into the box-stall with his pony, and play at circus with it; he stood up on the pony, and his sister was the ring-master. The picture of his careless childhood reflected a deeper pathos upon his troubled present, and he sighed again.
His father said, as they moved on through the barn: “Some of the best people I've ever known were what were called worldly people. They are apt to be sincere, and they have none of the spiritual pride, the conceit of self-righteousness, which often comes to people who are shut up by conscience or circumstance to the study of their own motives and actions.”
“I don't think she was one of that kind,” said Dan.
“Oh, I don't know that she was. But the chances of happiness, of goodness, would be greater with a less self-centred person—for you.”
“Ah, Yes! For me!” said Dan bitterly. “Because I hadn't it in me to be frank with her. With a man like me, a woman had better be a little scampish, too! Father, I could get over the loss; she might have died, and I could have got over that; but I can't get over being to blame.”
“I don't think I'd indulge in any remorse,” said his father. “There's nothing so useless, so depraving, as that. If you see you're wrong, it's for your warning, not for your destruction.”