trial for embezzlement, and take his punishment. Or a man, if he was
that kind of a man, could skip. The question with Northwick was whether
he was that kind of man, or whether, if he skipped, he would be that
kind of man; whether the skipping would make him that kind of man.

The question was a cruel one for the self-respect which he had so
curiously kept intact. He had been respectable ever since he was born;
if he was born with any instinct it was the instinct of respectability,
the wish to be honored for what he seemed. It was all the stronger in
him, because his father had never had it; perhaps an hereditary trait
found expression in him after passing over one generation; perhaps an
antenatal influence formed him to that type. His mother was always
striving to keep the man she had married worthy of her choice in the
eyes of her neighbors; but he had never seconded her efforts. He had
been educated a doctor, but never practised medicine; in carrying on the
drug and book business of the village, he cared much more for the
literary than the pharmaceutical side of it; he liked to have a circle
of cronies about the wood-stove in his store till midnight, and discuss
morals and religion with them; and one night, when denying the plenary
inspiration of the Scriptures, he went to the wrong jar for an
ingredient of the prescription he was making up; the patient died of his
mistake. The disgrace and the disaster broke his wife's heart; but he
lived on to a vague and colorless old age, supported by his son in a
total disoccupation. The elder Northwick used sometimes to speak of his
son and his success in the world; not boastfully, but with a certain
sarcasm for the source of his bounty, as a boy who had always
disappointed him by a narrowness of ambition. He called him Milt, and he
said he supposed now Milt was the most self-satisfied man in
Massachusetts; he implied that there were better things than material
success. He did not say what they were, and he could have found very few
people in that village to agree with him; or to admit that the treasurer
of the Ponkwasset Mills had come in anywise short of the destiny of a
man whose father had started him in life with the name of John Milton.
They called him Milt, too, among themselves, and perhaps here and there
a bolder spirit might have called him so to his face if he had ever come
back to the village. But he had not. He had, as they had all heard, that
splendid summer place