Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive, condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the general happiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, or in but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fall into manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, are clean within. Because women, he went on, are in every way more delicately made than men, we easily take it for granted they are more spiritual. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense of condemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_ of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed's performance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you," he really said, and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of them--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends. Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; and nothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to be so without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, no uncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or for righteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, invents some eleventh commandment to call that common which God hath cleansed; to call anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred to spotless affections. The Baron muttered something in German, and Fontenette shut his mouth tight and straightened up in approbation. At the close of the service we were not out of the pew before our escort was introducing Senda to his friends in front and behind as busily and elaborately as if that was what we had come for. Twice and again she cast so anxious an eye upon her husband--from whom Mrs. Fontenette had wisely taken shelter behind hers--that I softly said to her, "We'll take care of him." A care he was! All the way down the aisle, amid the peals of the organ, he commented on the sermon aloud, mostly to himself but also to whichever of us he could rub his glasses against. Sometimes he mistook others for us until they stared. His face showed a piteous, weary distress, his thin hair went twenty ways, he seemed scarcely to know where he was or how to take his steps, and presently was saying to a strange lady crowded against him, as though it was with her he had been talking all along: "Undt vhy shall we haf t'at owfool troubple? No-o, t'at vould kill me! I am not a cat to keep me alvays clean--no more as a hogk to keep me always not clean. No, I keep me--owdside--inside--always so clean as it comes eassy, undt I leave me so dirty as it comes eassy." XIII