"Meaning that I am the old gentleman?" Maurice retorted, trying to be lightsome. "Oh, don't joke. I can't stand it. I've been through so much, and this is so terrible a thing to bear anyway." Wynne seized his rosary with one hand, and struck it across the other so hard that the corner of the crucifix wounded his finger. "Phil, old fellow," he said gravely, "I never felt less like joking. It cuts me to the quick to see you suffer; and I know how hard you will take this. I know what it is, for I'm going through the same thing myself, and I've about made up my mind that we are wrong. I begin to think that celibacy is only a device that the early church somehow got into when it was necessary to hold complete authority over the priest, or when men thought that it was. It belongs to the Middle Ages; not to the nineteenth century." "Then you don't see how marriage would be sure to interfere with a man's zeal for his work?" "But it would certainly bring him into closer sympathy with humanity." Ashe shook his head. "You don't seem to realize," he said with a certain doggedness which Wynne had seldom seen in him, "how it must absorb a man, and take possession of his very reason. Why, see me. I know it is a sin to think of her, and yet"--He broke off and choked. "Besides," he resumed presently, "you say yourself that you feel as I do, and that means that you are not looking at the thing fairly. You are trying to make your conscience come round to the side of your desires." They walked on up the dingy street into which they had come, and for some time nothing more was said. Maurice recognized that it was idle to attempt to reply to the charge of his companion. He had made it to himself and succumbed to it; but now that another stated it, he instinctively found himself refusing to yield. He repeated to himself that he was not trying to befool his conscience, but merely acting with human sanity. Presently they came into a dusky court, and crossing it, found themselves at the door of an ill-smelling tenement house. Here Ashe turned suddenly, and faced his friend, his face full of strange excitement. "Do you suppose," he said, in a voice which, though low, was full of feeling, "that I do not know how absorbing a thing it is to give up life to a woman? Here I am, when she is nothing to me, when I do not mean ever to see her again, going into this place simply because here she was half a minute in my arms, because here for two minutes she looked at me as her preserver. It is sin, and I know it; but it is too strong for me." "But, Phil," Maurice exclaimed in astonishment, "there is surely no harm in going to see a sick woman." The other laughed bitterly. "So I told myself, and so I kept saying over and over till the talk we've had forced me to stop lying to myself. I'm not going to see a sick woman. I'm going to stand where she stood that day."