“Huh!... Maybe! But who knows what is right and what is wrong? It’s a guess, and everybody does his own guessing.... There are your Ten Commandments, sure enough, but you can’t regulate the whole world and all it does with ten little rules.... Let’s see! Wasn’t there an eleventh commandment later on? I used to go to Sunday-school myself. Something to the effect that you ought to love your neighbor as yourself? A God that could make that sort of a commandment isn’t going to be too stiff-backed about the other ten. No, sir.... Things are too mixed up for _anything_ to be all wrong or all right. Everything’s a mixture—and the more of that love-your-neighbor stuff there is in it, why, my notion is, the nearer it is to what is really good.” Ken was surprised. He had never accused Bert of so much abstract speculation, and perhaps Bert had not been speculating consciously before. It was rather that these ideas had been taking root in him and growing spontaneously. Possibly Bert was himself astonished to find himself uttering such ideas. “It’s over now,” Bert said, presently, “so let’s shut up about it. You’re in a devil of a state of mind, and the only thing to get rid of _that_ is to walk it off. As soon as I finish this cheese I’m going to take you out and walk you till you’re human again—or till you drop.” “I’ll walk.... I’ll do anything. I want to get outdoors and move.” “Come on, then, sonny, but be genial—be genial. It’s a walk we’re going for, not a march to the grave.” They walked over to the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, which presented to them a face of little second-class shops, dairy products, bakeries, locksmiths, antiques, wine-shops, variety-stores, in front of every second one of which was its cat—a huge, sleek Thomas or a matronly old Tabby keeping an eye on two or three adventurous kittens. The street seemed to have a special leaning toward the feline in pets. But, then, all Paris is a sanctuary for cats, which is remarkable when one takes into account the number of dogs, and even jackals and young foxes, the latter affected by the ladies. It may be that there is a permanent truce between the dogs and cats in Paris. Bert remarked that he had never seen a cat chased by a dog there. Possibly, he declared, it might be the system. American dogs chased cats. It was their moral code to do so; Parisian dogs left cats alone, for a similar reason. “It’s all a matter of where you live,” he said, in an effort to arouse Kendall. “Maybe there’s a place in the world where they put deacons in jail and look up reverently to burglars. You can’t tell. I suppose folks could agree among themselves to almost anything.” “Except to alter a natural law,” said Ken, harshly.