“I won’t conceal it from you, old man, that I was in bad shape that night you came in on me here. I saw everything red--not pink, but a bright burning scarlet. You won’t mind my saying it, but your call was deucedly inopportune. I had come up here with my tongue hanging out to drink that quart, and to be caught with the goods on by a gentleman of the cloth annoyed me. I’ll not spare your feelings in the matter! And then you looked so fresh and fit and good that that riled me too. I was ashamed of it afterward--the way I received your life confession. And the bottle----” “Did you eat it?” laughed Paddock, delighted to find his old friend in this gay humour. “I told you I was going to the bad that night, and you went out with a hurt look as though I had kicked your dog or done some low thing of that sort. Your tact is wholly admirable. If you had said one word to me when I told you I had started for hell I should have screamed and made a terrible fuss. Strong men could not have held me. You went away and left me, by which token I know you possess the wisdom of serpents. And I proceeded at once to get beautifully drunk.” Paddock said nothing, but smiled sadly. “But I have cut it out now. I shall look no more upon the rum bottle when it’s red, not because I don’t like it, but because I’ve thought of much more dreadful and heinous sins.” “Then,” said Paddock, not understanding, “I have merely stimulated your ambition as a sinner.” “That’s exactly it. There’s something rather contemptible about drunkenness. A man of education ought to do worse or be very, very good. Well, how goes the work?” “First rate. That’s what I came in to see you about. I want you, as a leading citizen, to come and look at my plant.” “Certainly, I’ll do that with pleasure, sometime, provided your real design isn’t to show me off as an awful example. Mind you, I don’t stand for that. At any rate, I was brought up in the strict letter of the Presbyterian faith, and if I have any value as an example of what shouldn’t be, the Presbyterians have first call. It would be low down in me to pose for you Episcopalians, who are a rival body.” “I don’t want you to pose as anything; just sit on the back seat and watch the events of an evening. The hat isn’t passed--no sermon--maybe a song or two, but you don’t have to sing. Your chauffeur will know how to take you out; he quite eclipses me. His batting averages make him a marked man; his record of strike-outs his last season on the diamond lifted him quite out of the back-lot class.” “Am I to understand that Joe Denny has fallen under your spell and frequents the parish house? Well, I thought he was sneaking the machine out at night pretty often, but I didn’t give him credit for anything so noble. I thought it was somebody’s housemaid.” “He says he can pitch with his left hand just as well as with his right, but he’s passed up the cheering diamond out of devotion to you. He talks about you with tears in his eyes.”