He was tired, he said, of
the crystal-hearted, noble-thinking young man of fiction. Besides, it
made bad reading for the "young person." It gave her false ideas, and
made her dissatisfied with mankind as he really is.
And, thereupon, he launched forth and sketched us his idea of a hero,
with reference to whom I can only say that I should not like to meet him
on a dark night.
Brown, our one earnest member, begged us to be reasonable, and reminded
us, not for the first time, and not, perhaps, altogether unnecessarily,
that these meetings were for the purpose of discussing business, not of
talking nonsense.
Thus adjured, we attacked the subject conscientiously.
Brown's idea was that the man should be an out-and-out blackguard, until
about the middle of the book, when some event should transpire that would
have the effect of completely reforming him. This naturally brought the
discussion down to the question with which I have commenced this chapter:
Does man ever reform? I argued in the negative, and gave the reasons for
my disbelief much as I have set them forth here. MacShaughnassy, on the
other hand, contended that he did, and instanced the case of himself--a
man who, in his early days, so he asserted, had been a scatterbrained,
impracticable person, entirely without stability.
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