MR. GABOR--I have looked on at your ingenious educational methods for fourteen years in silence. They were contrary to my ideas. I had always lived under the persuasion that a child was not a plaything, that a child had a claim upon our most earnest efforts. But I said to myself, if the grace and esprit of one parent are able to take the place of the other’s serious principles, why, they may be preferable to the serious principles.--I am not blaming you, Fanny; but don’t stand in my way when I am trying to make good to the boy the wrong that both you and I have done him. MRS. GABOR--I will stand in your way as long as a drop of blood runs warm in my veins! In a House of Correction my child will be lost. A criminal nature may perhaps be bettered in such institutions.--I don’t know. A child naturally good will there as certainly become criminal as a plant degenerates when deprived of air and sun. I am conscious of no wrong done him. I thank God to-day as always that He showed me the way to awaken in my child an upright character and noble mind. What has he done then that’s so dreadful?--I haven’t the least idea of trying to exculpate him!--For being turned out of school he needs no exculpation; and if he =were= at fault, he has paid for it.--You may know better about all that; you may be perfectly right theoretically. But I cannot let my only child be driven and forced to his destruction! MR. GABOR--That does not depend upon us, Fanny. That is a risk that we took upon ourselves along with our happiness. He that is too feeble for the march is left by the wayside. And it is surely not so bad as it might be, if the inevitable comes in time. May Heaven defend us from it! Our duty is to steady the waverer as long as reason can find means to do it.--That he has been expelled from school is not his fault. If he had =not= been expelled from school, that wouldn’t have been his fault, either.--You take things too lightly. You see only inquisitive trifling where fundamental lesions of character are really involved. You women are not qualified to judge such things. Anyone who can write what Melchior writes must be degenerate at the innermost core of his being. His essence is tainted. No nature that’s half-way healthy permits itself that sort of thing. We are all of us flesh and blood: every one of us strays from the strict, true path. But what he has written represents a =principle=. What he has written is no chance, casual slip, but documentary proof, of ghastly clarity, of that frankly affected =purpose=, that natural propensity, that bent toward the immoral because it =is= immoral!--it manifests that exceptional spiritual corruption that we jurists designate as moral imbecility.--Whether his condition can be in any way remedied, I am not able to say. If we would retain one glimmer of hope,--and, before all, consciences as his parents free from remorse,--we must apply ourselves with decision and in all earnestness to the task.--Let us