"No, he didn't. 'Tis my very own thought. Suppose, Dan, that He'd been the earliest man born of a woman, and comed into the world Eve's first li'l one? How would that plan have worked?" He stared at her. "Who could have crucified Him?" he asked. She sighed. "I forgot that." "It shows how ill-regulated your mind is, Sarah Jane. You oughtn't to let your ideas run so wild." "'Tis no fault of yours that they do. And yet your fault it is, I do believe, Dan, for you keep me so terrible close to holy thoughts." "The closer the better through the time that's coming. To think you could picture my boots stamping life out of a fellow-creature! 'Twasn't a kind fancy, to say no more of it. As much as to say I might be no better than a wild beast, given the temptation." "All men are beasts when the wind blows from somewhere," she said. "Let a certain thing but happen, and they'll be as hot and stubborn and hard and fierce as the animals. Some would never forgive being robbed; some would never forgive being laughed at; some would never forgive being deceived by another person. Everybody's got one spot like that. Some will go mad for a woman; some for a thing. Why did Agg quarrel with Lethbridge and knock him off his feet into the stream last week? Such an easy, lazy man as Agg to do it!" "Because Lethbridge said that Agg would get a girl at Mary Tavy into trouble before he'd done with her. 'Twas an insult, and Agg was quite right to knock him down. 'Twas no fault in him." She did not answer. Then he spoke again. "Don't think I don't know my faults. I know 'em well enough. The gospel light shows them up very clear. But jealousy ban't a fault, and I never will allow it is. 'Tis a virtue, and every self-respecting married Christian ought to be jealous. I'm jealous of the whole world that comes near you. I'm jealous of every male eye I catch upon your face--at church or anywhere. 'Tis my nature so to be. A man that marries hands over to his wife the best he's got, and 'tis just as precious to a day labourer as to a crowned king. He does well to be jealous of it. He'd be a mean-minded fashion of creature if he wasn't." "I don't feel like that," she replied. "You've said yourself that nought can hurt a man from the outside; so how can a wife hurt a man?" "Good Lord! what a lot you've got to learn, Sarah Jane! To talk of a wife as being outside! Ban't she the innermost of all--a man's own self--next to his God? 'Outside'! I wouldn't like for anybody else to hear you say a man's wife is outside him--and you a wife yourself." "I'm rested," she said. "Us'll go on. I wish I was so deep-minded as you, but I never shall be. A regular Old Testament man you are."