“I mean,” said Paddock, “that he’s too much of a man for the devil to handle. There’s real manhood in Wayne Craighill; he would be lonesome in hell. And besides, the road downward isn’t so easy as it looks. Please understand me, gentlemen, I’m not talking religion; I’m merely stating the plain truth from my own observation and experience. I had the same idea once myself. I’m not proud of it and mention it only to illuminate my point. I used to get most beastly and hideously drunk, so I don’t take a purely academic view of such cases, but where there’s any manhood left in a fellow he can’t be as wicked as he wants to be. I’ve had my eye on Wayne all winter. Good influences have touched him. But with the good came unhappiness and he saw no way out but the red door that pushes in on greased hinges. He’s like a child. When he can’t get what he wants he vents his rage by getting drunk and trying to tear the town to pieces. He will profit by a brief rustication in a safe place where no one will bother him and where he won’t feel the shame of being hustled into a drunkard’s cure somewhere. We can always fall back on the doctors. Let’s send him to a place I know over here in Virginia where they’re practising a new idea in just such cases----” “Hypnotism, psychotherapy--what is it?” asked Wingfield. “Bless you, no! It’s the idea I’ve already suggested, which was developed by a friend of mine in the ministry, that no man can be as base as he wants to be--an attack on sin on the score of its futility. Wayne had begun to catch glimpses of that a little while ago. He thought he saw a straight road right down to the bottom, but he was surprised to find that it wasn’t such clear sailing after all. Something happened very unexpectedly to make him pause; then he couldn’t get what he wanted so he decided it was all off again and he’s been drunk and disorderly. Now if you’ll let me have him for a couple of weeks, I’ll see if we can’t give him a new idea or two, and when you’ve interrupted the downward course several times--a score if necessary--he’ll begin to understand that we don’t really fashion our own lives at all. As I said before, we can’t be as wicked as we’d like to be--assuming, of course, that we are not utterly depraved and abandoned and that there’s still something left to nail to. All this isn’t my idea--Paul Stoddard suggested it.” “Stoddard--the Protestant monk,” remarked Wingfield doubtfully. “Not in the mediæval sense, however,” replied Paddock. “He’s an original, up-to-date monk. He takes cases that everybody else has given up--and he has no failures.” “Um. If you think praying over Wayne Craighill will cure him of drunkenness you can do it,” growled Walsh, who had with difficulty rescued Wayne from the clutches of the police only the night before. “I’d rather try some other kind of medicine.” “You needn’t be afraid of Stoddard. He won’t pray over Wayne or scold him or preach to him.”