And Dale thought how the man, when he was alive, dealt with any innocent unprotected girl who chanced to fall into his power. In imagination he saw him taking care of Mavis, when she was young and tender, and scarcely knew right from wrong. In imagination he saw it all again--the pattings and pawings, the scheming and devising, the luring and ensnaring--Barradine and Mavis--the man of many years and the girl of few years, the serpent and the dove, the destroyer and the destroyed. Those torturing mental pictures glowed and took form, and were as vivid now as when, in the hour of his grief and despair, he first made them and saw them.
This departed saint, whose memory had become as a fragrance of myrrh, whose name sounded like the clinking of an incense-pot swung by devout hands, whose monument stood firm as a temple built upon the rock, was simply a dirty old beast for whom no excuse could be possible. What worse crime can there be than that of befouling youth? Who is a worse enemy to the commonweal than he who snatches and steals for his transient gratification treasures that are accumulating to make some honest man's life-long joy? Such wanton abuse of society's law and nature's plan is the unpardonable sin; it is sin as monstrous as the enormities that brought down fire upon the dwellers in the cities of the plain.
To Dale the idea of an offense so gross that its perpetrator deserved neither pity nor mercy was if anything stronger now than when it had first entered and filled his mind.
Yet it seemed to him that now, after all the years that had gone by, he could for the first time perfectly understand the dark and shameful tangle of emotions through which the sinner moved onward to his sin. It seemed that with luminous clearness he could look right into the corrupt heart of the dead man. He could understand all, though he could forgive nothing. He could measure the force of every thought and sensation that had pushed the dead man on and on.
After middle-age the blood grows stagnant, habit dulls the edge of appetite, a weariness of the mind and of the body makes one cease to taste well-used delights; a strong new stimulus is required to revive the emotional life that is sinking to decay. Such a stimulus must not only be strong and new, it must be light, delicate, altogether strange. The effect it produces is due to charm and spell as much as to substance and form.
To people who are elderly, youth itself, merely because it is youth, exercises a tremendous fascination. It sheds an atmosphere that is pleasant to breathe. It seems like a fountain of life in which, if we might bathe, we should take some rejuvenating virtue as well as a soothing bliss. There is a common saying that it makes one feel young just to consort with young people.