himself, as a
gentleman and a citizen, and he could not conceal from himself that he
had been mainly instrumental in the escape of a rogue from justice, when
he got the Board to give Northwick a chance. His ideals had not hitherto
stood in the way of his comfort, his entire repose of mind, any more
than they had impaired his prosperity, though they were of a kind far
above those which commercial honor permits a man to be content with. He
held himself bound, as a man of a certain origin and social tradition,
to have public spirit, and he had a great deal of it. He believed that
he owed it to the community to do nothing to lower its standards of
personal integrity and responsibility; and he distinguished himself by a
gratified consciousness from those people of chromo-morality, who held
all sorts of loose notions on such points. His name stood not merely for
so much money; many names stood for far more; but it meant reliability,
it meant honesty, it meant good faith. He really loved these things,
though, no doubt, he loved them less for their own sake than because
they were spiritual properties of Eben Hilary. He did not expect
everybody else to have them, but his theory of life exacted that they
should be held the chief virtues. He was so conscious of their value
that he ignored all those minor qualities in himself which rendered him
not only bearable but even lovable; he was not aware of having any sort
of foibles, so that any error of conduct in himself surprised him even
more than it pained him. It was not easy to recognize it; but when he
once saw it, he was not only willing but eager to repair it.

The error that he had committed in Northwick's case, if it was an error,
was one that presented peculiar difficulties, as every error in life
does; the errors love an infinite complexity of disguise, and masquerade
as all sorts of things. There were moments when Hilary saw his mistake
so clearly that it seemed to him nothing less than the repayment of
Northwick's thefts from his own pocket would satisfy the claims of
justice to his fellow-losers if Northwick ran away; and then again, it
looked like the act of wise mercy which it had appeared to him when he
was urging the Board to give the man a chance as the only thing which
they could hopefully do in the circumstances, as common sense, as
business. But it was now so obvious that a man like Northwick could and
would do nothing but run away if he were given the chance, tha