coroner.

Michael had not said by what train he would arrive, and so after the
journey he was able to walk to Basingstead through lanes freshening for
evening. By this time the irony of the cat's fortuitous interference was
blunted, and Michael was able to see himself in clearer relation to the
fact of Prescott's death. He was no longer occupied by the strange
sensation of being implicated in one of the sufficiently conspicuous
daily deaths exalted by the press to the height of a tragedy. Yet for
once the press had not been so exaggerative. Prescott's life was surely
a tragedy, and his death was only not a tragedy because it had violated
all the canons of good form and had falsified the stoicism of nearly
fifty years. Yet why should not the stoic ideal be applied to such a
death? It was an insult to such perfect manners to suppose that a
hopeless love for a girl had led him to take his life. Surely it would
be kinder to ascribe it to the accumulative boredom of August in London,
or possibly to a sudden realization of vulgarity creeping up to the very
portals of the Albany.

Michael was rather anxious to believe in this theory, because he was
beginning to reproach himself more seriously than when the cat had first
obtruded a sardonic commentary on his own behavior in having given away
to the panic of wishing to listen no longer to the dead man's
confidences. With all his personal regrets it was disconcerting to think
of a man whose attitude to life had seemed so correct making this
hurried exit, an exit too that left his reputation a prey to the public,
so that his whole existence could be soiled after death by the
inquisitive grubbing of a coroner. Prescott had always seemed secure
from an humiliation like this. The mezzotints of stern old admirals, the
soldier-servant, the fashionable cloister in which he lived, the
profound consciousness he always betrayed of the importance of restraint
whether in morals or cravats had seemed to combine in unrelaxing
guardianship of his good form. The harder Michael thought about the
business, the more incredible it appeared. Himself in an earlier mood of
self-distrust had accepted Prescott as an example to whose almost
contemptuous attitude of withdrawal he might ultimately aspire. He had
often reproached himself for outlived divergencies of thought and
action, and with the example of Prescott he had hammered into himself
the possibility of eternal freedom from their recurrence. And