That is an aside. What I want to say is, that while the duello has always been barbarous, and has now become ridiculous as well, nevertheless it had some good features, one of which I think you might use effectively in Owen Kilgariff’s case. As I understand the matter, it was the custom under the code duello, sometimes to call a “court of honour” to decide in a doubtful case precisely what honour required a man to do, and, as I understand, the decision of such a court was final, so far as the man whose duty was involved was concerned. It was deemed the grossest of offences to call in question the conduct of a man who acted in accordance with the finding of a court of honour.
Now why cannot you call a court of honour to sit upon this case? Without revealing Kilgariff’s identity—which of course you could not do except by his permission—you could lay before the court a succinct but complete statement of the case, and ask it to decide whether or not the man concerned can, with honour, accept a commission in the service without making the facts public. I am sure the verdict will be in the affirmative, and armed with such a decision you can overcome the poor fellow’s scruples and work a cure that is well worth working.
Try my plan if it commends itself to your judgment, not otherwise.
Little by little, I am finding out a good deal about our Evelyn Byrd. Better still, I am learning to know her, and she interests me mightily. She has a white soul and a mind that it is going to be a delight to educate. She has already read a good deal in a strangely desultory and unguided fashion, but her learning is utterly unbalanced.
For example, she has read the whole, apparently, of the _Penny Cyclopædia_—in a very old edition—and she has accepted it all as unquestionable truth. Nobody had ever told the poor child that the science of thirty years ago has been revised and enlarged since that time, until I made the point clear to her singularly quick and receptive mind in the laboratory yesterday. She seems also to have read, and well-nigh committed to memory, the old plays published fifty or sixty years ago under the title of _The British Drama_, but she has hardly so much as heard of our great modern writers. She can repeat whole dialogues from _Jane Shore_, _She Stoops to Conquer_, _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_, _High Life Below Stairs_, and many plays of a much lower moral character; but even the foulest of them have manifestly done her no harm. Her own innocence seems to have performed the function of the feathers on a duck’s back in a shower. She is so unconscious of evil, indeed, that I do not care to explain my reasons to her when I suggest that she had better not repeat to others some of the literature that she knows by heart.