He had never, he rather wistfully reflected, either coveted or stolen anything worth speaking of: he might have had some such abominable action to repent of, if only he had not always possessed a plenty of money to purchase whatever he fancied. That over-well filled purse had also kept him from laboring upon the Sabbath, or any day. And it had, by ill luck, never even occurred to him to worship a graven image. Nor had it ever occurred to him to break his given word. Philippe, he remembered, had referred to that as being rather queer, but it did not seem queer to Florian: this was simply a thing that Puysange did not do. The word of honor of a Puysange, once given, could not in any circumstances be broken: to Florian that was an axiom sufficiently obvious. He had told many falsehoods, of course. For an instant the reflection brightened him: but he found dejectedly, on looking back, that all these falsehoods appeared to have been told either to some woman who was chaste or to some husband who was suspicious, entirely with the view of curing these failings and making matters more pleasant for everybody. A Puysange did not lie with the flat-footed design of getting something for himself, because such deviations from exactness, somehow, made you uncomfortable; nor through fear, because a Puysange, quite candidly, did not understand what people meant when they talked about fear. No, one must be logical. Florian found that his sins—to name for once the quaint term with which so many quaint people would, he knew, label the majority of his actions,—seemed untiringly to have labored toward beneficence. Florian was not prepared to assert that this established any general rule: for some persons, it well might be that the practise of these technical irregularities produced actual unhappiness: but Florian was here concerned just with his own case. And it did not, whatever a benevolent saint advised,—and ought, of course, in his exalted position to advise,—it did not afford the material for any rational sort of repentance. And to prevaricate about this deficiency, or to patch up with Heaven through mutual indulgence some not quite candid compromise, was not a proceeding in which Florian cared to have part, or could justify with honorable precedents. Say what you might, even though you spoke from behind the locked gates of paradise, Puysange remained Puysange, and wholly selfish and utilitarian lying made Puysange uncomfortable.