"This man," Valentine said, assuming a devout earnestness to trick her
more, and watching for the puzzled expression to grow and to deepen in
her eyes,--"this man had a holy nature, or I will say an unalterable will
to do only things pure, reserved, refined--things that could not lead his
body into difficulties, or his mind into quagmires. He was a saint
without a religion. That is a possibility, I assure you; for a will
can be amazingly independent. He had the peculiar grace that is said to
belong to angels, a definite repugnance to sin. I know you understand
me."
She nodded bluntly.
"I know--he couldn't go wrong, if it was ever so," she ejaculated.
"If it was ever so--as the housemaids say--you put the position of this
man in a nutshell, and if this strange will of his had never relented,
the transformation I am going to describe, or--" he paused for a moment
as if in doubt, then continued--"or rather to hint at, would never have
taken place. But he grew dissatisfied with his will. It bored him ever so
little. He fancied he would like to change it, and to substitute for it
the will of the world. And the will of the world, as you know well, my
lady of the feathers, is to sin. For some time he longed, vaguely enough,
to be different, to be, in fact, lower down in the scale than he was.
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