It was an eventful night for him. His shyness soon wore off, for during these months he had been learning to accept any new experience gladly. "Life is made up of experience," his teacher had said, "therefore welcome every opportunity to broaden your life by travelling in new tracks. There are just two restrictions--the injurious and the immoral. You must grow by experience, but be sure you grow the right way. Only a fool must personally seize the red iron to see if it will burn. . . But most of us are fools." And as he sat among this company of the best minds of the town he felt that a new and very real world was opening before him. His good clothes seemed to work up in some way through his sub-consciousness and give him a sense of capability. He was in the mental atmosphere of men who did things, and by conforming to their customs he had brought his mind into harmony with theirs, so that it could receive suggestions, and--who knows?--return suggestions. And he was made to think, think, think. As he walked home with Mr. Duncan under the stars he spoke of the subtle sense of well-being and ability which came with good clothes. "I don't mind confessing I have always had something like contempt for stylish dressing," he said. "Now I almost feel that there's something to it." "There is some good quality in everything that survives," said Mr. Duncan. "Otherwise it would not survive. That doesn't mean, of course, that the good qualities outweigh the bad, but the good must be there. Take the use of liquor, for instance; perhaps the greatest source of misery we have. Yet it touches a quality in man's life: sociability, conviviality, if you like; but a quality that has virtue in it none the less. And the errors of sex are so often linked with love that one can scarcely say where virtue ceases and where vice begins. I know convention placards them plainly enough, but convention does not make virtue vice, nor vice virtue. There are deeper laws down beneath, and sometimes they may set at defiance all accepted codes. "Yet I would not quarrel with the accepted codes--until I knew I had something better. Accepted codes represent man's net progress through experience to truth. The code, for instance, 'Thou shalt not kill;' we accept it in general, but not completely. The State does not hesitate to kill in self-defence, or even to carry out purposes which have no relation to defence. And shall we not allow similar exceptions to the other codes? And yet, although we may find our codes are not infallible, are they not still the best guides we have? "To return to clothes. Clothes won't make you, but they will help you to make yourself. Only, don't become a clothes-tippler. You can run to intoxication on fine raiment as well as on fine wines. It has virtue in it, but just beyond the virtue lies the vice." CHAPTER EIGHT