The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as in the best and purest, seemed to be struggling back to some relation and likeness to our average sinful humanity, insisting that if socially and publicly we denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our secret hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that on their hopelessly sunken level their common humanity kept that symmetry and proportion which physical deformity shows, one could not doubt that a distorted kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the midst of their depravity: the man was like a gray-headed foolish boy; the two women as simple and cunning as too naughty children. It could be imagined that they had their friendly moments; that in extremity they might care for each other; that even such a life as theirs had its reliefs from perdition, as in disease there is relief from pain, and no suffering, out of romance, is incessant. They had certainly their decorums, their criterions. On their plane, everything but the theft and the noisy quarrel was of custom and for granted; but these were misdemeanors and disgraceful. Like another hostess of the sort, the fallen spirit was aggrieved at these. “Do you think I keep thieves in my house?... The tithe of a hair was never lost in my house before.... I’ll no swaggerers.... There comes no swaggering here.... I will bar no honest man my house, nor no cheater; but I do not love swaggering.” This is the sum of what she said that she had said in rebuke of the lost soul; that thieving and that swaggering, they incensed her, and roused in her all the instincts of a moral and respectable person. Humanity adjusts itself to all conditions, and doubtless God forsakes it in none, but still shapes it to some semblance of health in its sickness, of order in its disorder, of righteousness in its sin.