“Maybe things didn’t go wrong when I met Dominique,” Starbuck said, striking obliquely away from his friend’s stern words. “Maybe it went wrong when I first went to Yale. Or when I agreed to be baptized. I’ve never felt like a Christian, Adam. I should never have let Father baptize me. I should never have let him send me to seminary. I’ve been living a lie.” He thought of his prayers at a dead woman’s grave, and blushed. “I don’t think I’ve even been converted. I’m not a true Christian at all.”

“Of course you are!” Adam was shocked at his friend’s apostasy.

“No,” Starbuck insisted. “I wish I was. I’ve seen other men converted. I’ve seen the happiness in them, and the power of the Holy Spirit in them, but I’ve never really experienced the same thing. I’ve wanted to, I’ve always wanted to.” He paused. He could think of no one else to whom he could speak like this, only Adam. Good honest Adam who was like Faithful to John Bunyan’s Christian. “My God, Adam,” Starbuck went on, “but I’ve prayed for conversion! I’ve begged for it! But I’ve never known it. I think, maybe, that if I was saved, if I was born again, I’d have the strength to resist lust, but I don’t and I don’t know how to find that strength.” It was an honest, pathetic admission. He had been raised to believe that nothing in his whole life, not even his life itself, was as important as the necessity for conversion. Conversion, Starbuck had been taught, was the moment of being born again into Christ, that miraculous instant in which a man allowed Jesus Christ into his heart as his Lord and Savior, and if a man did allow that marvelous ingress to happen, then nothing would ever be the same again because all of life and all of subsequent eternity would be transmuted into a golden existence. Without salvation life was nothing but sin and hell and disappointment; with it there was joy, love and heaven everlasting.

Except Starbuck had never found that moment of mystical conversion. He had never experienced the joy. He had pretended to, because such a pretense was the only way to satisfy his father’s insistence on salvation, yet all his life had been a lie since that moment of pretense. “There’s something worse,” he confessed to Adam now. “I’m beginning to suspect that real salvation, real happiness, doesn’t lie in the experience of conversion at all, but in abandoning the whole concept. Maybe I’ll only be happy if I can reject the whole paraphernalia?”