ANN. [unconvinced] Then why did you break off our confidences and become quite strange to me?
TANNER. [enigmatically] It happened just then that I got something that I wanted to keep all to myself instead of sharing it with you.
ANN.
I am sure I shouldn't have asked for any of it if you had grudged it.
TANNER.
It wasn't a box of sweets, Ann.
It was something you'd never have let me call my own.
ANN. [incredulously] What?
TANNER.
My soul.
ANN.
Oh, do be sensible, Jack.
You know you're talking nonsense.
TANNER.
The most solemn earnest, Ann.
You didn't notice at that time that you were getting a soul too.
But you were.
It was not for nothing that you suddenly found you had a moral duty to chastise and reform Rachel.
Up to that time you had traded pretty extensively in being a good child; but you had never set up a sense of duty to others.
Well, I set one up too.
Up to that time I had played the boy buccaneer with no more conscience than a fox in a poultry farm.
But now I began to have scruples, to feel obligations, to find that veracity and honor were no longer goody-goody expressions in the mouths of grown up people, but compelling principles in myself.
ANN. [quietly] Yes, I suppose you're right.
You were beginning to be a man, and I to be a woman.
TANNER.
Are you sure it was not that we were beginning to be something more?
What does the beginning of manhood and womanhood mean in most people's mouths?
You know: it means the beginning of love.
But love began long before that for me.
Love played its part in the earliest dreams and follies and romances I can remember—may I say the earliest follies and romances we can remember?—though we did not understand it at the time.
No: the change that came to me was the birth in me of moral passion; and I declare that according to my experience moral passion is the only real passion.
ANN.
All passions ought to be moral, Jack.
TANNER.
Ought!
Do you think that anything is strong enough to impose oughts on a passion except a stronger passion still?
ANN.
Our moral sense controls passion, Jack.
Don't be stupid.
TANNER.
Our moral sense!
And is that not a passion?
Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good times?
If it were not a passion—if it were not the mightiest of the passions, all the other passions would sweep it away like a leaf before a hurricane.
It is the birth of that passion that turns a child into a man.
ANN.
There are other passions, Jack.
Very strong ones.
TANNER.
All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless—mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence.