wed he had
hurled the shock of his resentment upon the tempter. In that moment of
weakness it had seemed to him an easy thing to let one's self go; to
yield to a friendly, if distrusted force; to place gratified ambition
above the sting of wounded scruples. Was he infallible that he should
make his judgment a law, or without reproach that he should set his
conscience as an arbiter?

Then in a sudden illumination he had seen the betrayal of his sophistry,
and he had stood his ground--for the strong man is not he who is
impervious to weaknesses, but he who, scorning his failures, towers over
them. He had felt the temptation and he had wavered, but not for long.
In all his periods of storm and stress he had found that his nature
rebounded in the end. Disquietude might waste his ardour; but give him
time to reorganise his forces, and his moral energy would triumph at the
last.

As he looked out upon the great bronze Washington against the
sad-coloured sky, he realised, with a pang like the thrust of
homesickness, the isolation in which he stood. An instinctive need to
justify himself had risen within him, and with it awoke the knowledge
that beyond that uncertain abstraction which he called "the People," he
was an alien among his kind. Galt was his friend, Tom Bassett he could
count on, a score of others would stand or fall in his service, but
where was the single emotion which bound him to humanity? Where the
common claim of kinship which belonged to Galt, to Bassett, and to all
mankind? He had known many men, but he knew not one who was not drawn by
some connecting link that was apart from patriotism, or ambition, or
desire. Then quickly there came to him, not the judge, who was the
parent of his intellect, but the withered little woman, who was not even
the mother of his body. The only happiness that rose and set in him was
that pitiable happiness that could not think his thoughts or speak his
speech. It had never occurred to him that he loved Marthy Burr--his
kindness had been wholly compassionate--it was the knowledge that she
loved him that now illuminated her image. It was the old blind craving
born again, to be first with somebody--for there are moods in which it
is better to be adored by a dog than to adore a divinity. He beheld
Eugenia's womanhood as "A sword afar off"; but with him was the eternal
commonplace--his stepmother's sharp, pained eyes and shrivelled hands.
He had loved Eugenia until there was nothing