Let us hear these strange morals from the mouth of one of Howells’ _raisonneurs_, lawyer Atherton in “A Modern Instance.” Ben Halleck, one of the characters in the book, has committed a crime which the Puritan novelist could never forgive him. He loved and coveted platonically Marcia Hubbard, when Marcia’s husband was still faithful to her. Since then Hubbard (whom Howells foredoomed to evil) has become a degenerate and met with a tragic end. Marcia is free. Halleck still loves her. He can marry her and rescue her at last from her wretched existence. She deserves it. But Howells forbids it. Between the two lovers he raises the shadow of Halleck’s platonic aspirations. If he married Marcia, we are told that the world would come to its end. Halleck must remain a bachelor and abandon poor Marcia to her fate, in order to soothe the Puritan conscience of the author. Let us hear lawyer Atherton state Ben Halleck’s case: If a man like Ben Halleck goes astray it’s calamitous; it confounds the human conscience, as Victor Hugo says. All that careful nurture in the right since he could speak, all that life-long decency of thought and act, that noble ideal of unselfishness and respectability to others, trampled under foot and spit upon, it’s horrible. We are served after this with reflections upon the true nature of good and evil according to the code of Puritan respectability: The natural goodness does not count. The natural man is a wild beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast basking in the sun when his stomach is full.... No, it’s the implanted goodness that saves--the seed of righteousness treasured from generation to generation and carefully watched and tended by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have dropped it, it is what we call civilization.