“Virtue!” said the doctor, with contempt. “Virtue, in any decent code of morals, must include all the best qualities of the heart. You are one of the soulless Pharisees who would cover it with a fig-leaf. I thought I knew you better, Fannie. Some one says, if you would know a man, divide an inheritance with him; but, by ——, after you have slept in a woman’s arms twenty odd years, shared your fortune and all the joys and sorrows of life with her for that time, a simple case like this arises when you expect common human sympathy, and she fails you utterly.” Mrs. Forest began to sob quietly, but finding to her astonishment that this redoubtable weapon had lost its power over the soft-hearted doctor, she was piqued, and hardened her heart like a flint. She began hastily replacing her hair-pins in her hair. This was to punish him by depriving him of her presence for the night, which she had so sweetly promised. The doctor noted this movement, the critical moment, probably, if only his diplomacy had been equal to the situation; but he was “a plain, blunt man,” as Mark Antony says of himself, and he had already played his last card. He knew it was hopeless. Mrs. Forest, gentle, mild, pious, as she undoubtedly was, could not understand the doctor’s broad love of humanity. She had no power of loving anything that was not distinctly her own; but she was sure of her own integrity, and when told by the doctor that there was no more virtue in her love than in that of a hen for her chickens when she gathers her own under her wings, but pecks away all others, even though motherless and dying for care, she was not in the least disturbed; she was sure of her own position, and as immovable as a rock. “Do as you like,” he said to her, giving up the case, but determined to speak his mind freely; “do as you like, you and the other godly who pretend to be followers of one who said, ‘Neither do I condemn thee.’ Your respect for Christ is a common farce. It is merely a thing of form and respectability. You don’t take the trouble to see what manner of man he really was, or you would see how impossible it is for you to have any sentiments in common with him. Was he not a radical, sitting down with publicans and sinners, shocking all the conventional morality of his time, befriending the needy, supporting the outcasts of society, and a thorough despiser of all cant and hypocrisy?” “I dislike to hear any one quoting Christ who does not believe in him,” said Mrs. Forest very softly, but none the less angry for all that.