"I mean this, Hazlet; setting aside all considerations which affect your mere personal ruin--not mentioning the atrophy of spiritual life and the clinging sense of degradation which is involved in such a course as yours--I want you to see if you will be honest, that the fault is yet more deadly, because you involve _other_ souls and _other_ lives in your own destruction. Is it not a reminiscence sufficient to kill any man's hope, that but for his own brutality some who are now perhaps raving in the asylum might have been clasping their own children to their happy breasts, and wearing in unpolluted innocence the rose of matronly honour? Oh, Hazlet, I have heard you talk about missionary societies, and seen your name in subscription lists, but believe me you could not, by myriads of such conventional charities, cancel the direct and awful quota which you are now contributing to the aggregate of the world's misery and shame." It took a great deal to abash a mind like Hazlet's. He said that he was going to be a clergyman, and that it was necessary for him to see something of life, or he would never acquire the requisite experience. "Loathly experience!" said Julian with crushing scorn. "And do you ever hope, Hazlet, by centuries of preaching such as yours, to repair one millionth part of the damage done by your bad passions to a single fellow-creature? Such a hateful excuse is verily to carry the Urim with its oracular gems into the very sty of sensuality, and to debase your religion into `a procuress to the lords of hell.' I have done; but let me say, Hazlet, that your self-justification is, if possible, more repulsive than your sin." He pushed back his chair from the fire, and turned away, as Hazlet, with some incoherent sentences about "no business of his," left the room, and slammed the door behind him. What are words but weak motions of vibrating air? Julian's words passed by the warped nature of Hazlet like the idle wind, and left no more trace upon him than the snow-flake when it has melted into the purpling sea. As the weeks went on, his ill-regulated passions grew more and more free from the control of reason or manliness, and he sank downwards, downwards, downwards, into the most shameful abysses of an idle, and evil, and dissipated life. And the germ of that ruin was planted by the hand of the clever, and gay, and handsome Vyvyan Bruce. CHAPTER TWENTY TWO. DE VAYNE'S TEMPTATION. "And felt how awful goodness is, and virtue In her own shape how lovely." Milton's _Paradise Lost_.