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“Surely she did not neglect to teach you.”

“It is a strange thing to say, but she rather taught me too much. I don’t deny that it may have been my own fault. I don’t blame her, or any one. But you know what I was at college-no worse than other men, I dare say; but no better. I had no reason for being better.”

“No reason? Surely she gave you reasons.”

“There-you have touched the ailing nerve now. The reasons were what you would call paralogisms. They had no more to do with me than with those trout.”

“You mistake, friend, you mistake, indeed,” said I.

“I don’t mistake at all about this; that whether or not the reasons in themselves had to do with me, the way in which she put them made them practically so much Hebrew. She demanded of me, as the only grounds on which I was to consider myself safe from hell, certain fears and hopes which I did not feel, and experiences which I did not experience; and it was my fault, and a sign of my being in a wrong state-to use no harder term-that I did not feel them; and yet it was only God’s grace which could make me feel them: and so I grew up with a dark secret notion that I was a very bad boy; but that it was God’s fault and not mine that I was so.”

“You were ripe indeed then,” said I sadly, “like hundreds more, for Professor Windrush’s teaching.”

“I will come to that presently. But in the meantime-was it my fault? I was never what you call a devout person. My ‘organ of veneration,’ as the phrenologists would say, was never very large. I was a shrewd dashing boy, enjoying life to the finger-tips, and enjoying above all, I will say, pleasing my mother in every way, except in the understanding what she told me-and what I felt I could not understand. But as I grew older, and watched her, and the men round her, I began to suspect that religion and effeminacy had a good deal to do with each other. For the women, whatsoever their temperaments, or even their tastes might be, took to this to me incomprehensible religion naturally and instinctively; while the very few men who were in their clique were-I don’t deny some of them were good men enough-if they had been men at all: if they had been well-read, or well-bred, or gallant, or clear-headed, or liberal- minded, or, in short, anything but the silky, smooth-tongued hunt- the-slippers nine out of ten of them were. I recollect well asking my mother once, whether there would not be five times more women than men in heaven-and her answering me sadly and seriously, that she feared there would be. And in the meantime she brought me up to pray and hope that I might some day be converted, and become a child of God-And one could not help wishing to enjoy oneself as much as possible before that event happened.”

“Before that event happened, my dear fellow? Pardon me, but your tone is somewhat irreverent.”

“Very likely. I had no reason put before me for regarding such a change as anything but an unpleasant doom, which would cut me off, or ought to do so, from field sports, from poetry, from art, from science, from politics-for Christians, I was told, had nothing to do with the politics of this world-from man and all man’s civilisation, in short; and leave to me, as the only two lawful indulgences, those of living in a good house, and begetting a family of children.”

“And did you throw off the old Creeds for the sake of the civilisation which you fancied that they forbid?”

“No. I am a Churchman, you know; principally on political grounds, or from custom, or from-the devil knows what, perhaps-I do not.”