‘Yes, give a dog an ill name,’ said the other dispassionate thinker, ‘call it forgery, and it becomes a bogey and frightens everybody. And yet, after all, apart from the motive, it’s the simplest action. Then there’s the other thing, drink--which is so often the first step (I hope you have no leanings that way, though I seem to excuse it--for, right or wrong, it’s ruin)--well, there’s no sin, you know, in that. Wine’s not vice, nor even whisky. No one will tell me that to take two, three, or indeed any number of glasses of anything is vice.’ ‘Excess is vice,’ cried John. He felt himself redden with indignant fervour. The idea that any man could sit by him calmly and look him in the face and defend the indefensible--take up the cause of vice and criminality: he could not believe his ears. The criminal generally (so far as he was aware, especially the drunkard, of which kind the young man had seen in the way of his work some fine examples) is too apt to be unctuous in his repentance and quite uncompromising in his denunciation of his vice. To hear a man in this calm and apparently reasonable way discuss it as an open question was entirely new to him. ‘Excess is--excess,’ said this philosopher, ‘very bad for you, in whatever way you consider it; for the stomach and the constitution, also for your prospects in life, to which it is destruction;--that’s indisputable. But how far you can be said to break the moral law-- To be sure you may take higher ground or lower ground. You may say that whatever obscures your brain and makes you incapable of reflection and thought, which is the spiritual side of the question; or, on the other hand, whatever visibly interferes with your comfort and destroys your career-- But that last is mercenary,’ he added, with a wave of his hand, ‘and things that are mercenary and based on self-interest belong to a lower class of motives altogether; not what we were discussing at all.’ ‘There is nothing to discuss that I can see,’ cried John. ‘All that you say is a mere confusion of plain right and wrong. To forge another man’s name is to sin against your neighbour; and drink is a sin against--yourself, and everything that’s sane and rational. You own yourself it’s ruin; and it’s degradation and misery and everything that’s dreadful. I have seen it among the men----’