"No, Herrick, it is not to be bought so cheap. 'Tis a thing I have never known since my first youth, when I began to find out the inside of the apples of Sodom. Dust and ashes, friend: life is all dust and ashes, when once the curiosity of youth is satisfied and the novelty of sinful pleasures is worn off, if you call it sinful to drink and play deep, and to love the company of handsome unscrupulous women, which I do not." "If your mother were living, Jack, she whom you loved so well, whose memory I have heard you say is more sacred to you than anything else on the earth, would you have lived the life you are leading now?" "It would have vexed that pure and gentle spirit, Herrick, to see me as I am. Well, perhaps for her sake--yes, I have often told myself I should have been a better man had she lived--perhaps for her sake I might have forsworn sack and lived cleanly. But she is gone--she is at rest, where my follies cannot touch her." "How do you know that? Have you not spoken to me of the influence of the dead upon the living? Do you not think that in the after life there may be consciousness of the sins and sorrows of those that the dead have loved better than they ever loved themselves? Do you think the chain of love is so weak that death snaps it?" "The after life! Ah, Herrick, that is the question in which we are all at fault. It is uncertainty about that after life which damns us here. Better to fear hell than to be without hope beyond the grave. I swear, Herrick, I should be ever so much happier if I believed in the devil." "And in God." "That needs not saying. We all want to believe in a God, but we shirk the notion of a devil. Now I would accept Satan in all his integrity could I but believe in the rest of the spiritual world, angels and archangels, and all the hierarchy of heaven. If I could think that my mother's spirit hovered near me, could be vexed by my follies or moved by my penitence, that sweet spiritual influence would guard me from evil far better than any sublunary love. If I could believe, Herrick--but it is that damnable _if_ which wrecks us." "Do you not think, Jack, that it would pay a man to be a good Christian on speculation?" "You mean that the satisfaction of living a decent life, the consciousness of moral rectitude, and the better conduct of his affairs, would recompense him for the pains of self-denial, and that he would have the chance of future reward--say as one to ninety-nine--by way of bonus." "Ah, Jack, you are incorrigible. Bolingbroke and his disciple Voltaire have corrupted you."