can't be any hell worse than that I've gone through. Here I am talking
about hell," he continued, with a pained contraction of the muscles
about his mouth--a stillborn, malformed smile--"as if I believed in one!
I've got way through all my beliefs, you know. I tell you that frankly."

"It's none of my business," she reassured him. "I'm not your Bishop, or
your confessor. I'm just your friend, your pal, that's all."

"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new intensity of
glance and voice. "If I was going to live, I'd have some funny things to
tell. Six months ago I was a good man. I not only seemed to be good, to
others and to myself, but I was good. I had a soul; I had a conscience.
I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it. We were poor,
Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard toward us, and sometimes we
were a little down in the mouth about it; but that was all. We really
were happy; and I--I really was a good man. Here's the kind of joke God
plays! You see me here six months after. Look at me! I haven't got an
honest hair in my head. I'm a bad man through and through, that's what
I am. I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left anywhere
of the good man I used to be. And, mind you, I never lifted a finger
to prevent the change. I didn't resist once; I didn't make any fight.
I just walked deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open. I told
myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead, but I knew in
my heart that it was a lie. Everything about me was a lie. I wouldn't be
telling the truth, even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope.
Now, how do you explain that? How can it be explained? Was I really
rotten to the core all the time, years ago, when I seemed to everybody,
myself and the rest, to be good and straight and sincere? Was it all a
sham, or does God take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad
one, in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear of corn to