"It is a queer thing, Ted," he said, "but once, when I was not much
older than you, just such an unexpected chance influence made a crisis
in my life. I was crossing to England with the deliberate intention of
doing something which I knew was wrong. I thought it meant happiness,
but I know now it would have meant misery. On the boat was a young
clergyman of about my own age making his first, very likely his only,
trip abroad. I was thrown with him--we sat next each other at table, and
our cabins faced--and something in the man attracted me, a quality such
as you speak of in this other, of pure and uncommon goodness. He was
much the same sort as your old man, I fancy, not particularly winning,
rather narrow, rather limited in brains and in advantages, with a
natural distrust of progress and breadth. We talked together often, and
one day, I saw, by accident, into the depths of his soul, and knew what
he had sacrificed to become a clergyman--it was what meant to him
happiness and advancement in life. It had been a desperate effort, that
was plain, but it was plain, too, that from the moment he saw what he
thought was the right, there had been no hesitation in his mind. And I,
with all my wider mental training, my greater breadth--as I looked at
it--was going, with my eyes open, to do a wrong because I wished to do
it. You and I must be built something alike, Ted, for a touch in the
right spot seems to penetrate to the core of us--the one and the other.
This man's simple and intense flame of right living, right doing, all
unconsciously to himself, burned into me, and all that I had planned to
do seemed scorched in that fire--turned to ashes and bitterness. Of
course it was not so simple as it sounds. I went through a great deal.
But the steady influence for good was beside me through that long
passage--we were two weeks--the stronger because it was unconscious, the
stronger, I think, too, that it rested on no intellectual basis, but was
wholly and purely spiritual--as the confidence of a child might hold a