No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the doctor did for me that night. For the first time in my life an adult talked with me seriously, let me talk. Grown-ups had talked to and at me without end. I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the first to ask me what I believed. It was perhaps the great love for him, which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life especially interested in such as he. I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he interrupted me. "We’re smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more. I’m going to smoke. Want a cigar?" I did not smoke in those days. But the offer of that cigar, his treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary, to tell him of my credo. He sat there smoking silently and heard me through. "What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?" "I don’t know. I never happened to meet him in any laboratory. It sounds to me like a fairy story." "Then you’re an atheist," I said eagerly. "No. A skeptic." And he explained the difference. "How do you know what’s good and what’s bad?" "I don’t know," he replied. "I only know that some things are comfortable and some aren’t. It is uncomfortable to have people think you are a liar, especially so when you happen to be telling the truth. It is uncomfortable to be caught stealing. But I know some thieves who are uncaught and who seem quite comfortable. Above all it’s uncomfortable to know you are a failure." His voice trailed off wearily. It was several minutes before he began again. "I couldn’t tell you what’s right and what’s wrong—even if I knew. You don’t believe in God, why should you believe in me? If you don’t believe the Bible you mustn’t believe any book. No—that’s not what I mean. A lot of the Bible is true. Some of it we don’t believe, you and I. So with the other books—part true, part false. Don’t trust all of any book or any man." "How can I know which part to believe?" "You’d be the wisest man in all the world, my boy, if you knew that," he laughed. Then after a long silence, he spoke in a cold hard voice. "Listen to me. I’m not a good man to trust. I’m a failure." He told me the pitiful story of his life, told it in an even, impersonal tone as though it were the history of someone else. He had studied in Germany, had come back to New York, a brilliant surgeon, the head of a large hospital.