ance to
the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his
duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His eye fell on the
porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the
night, and he said to himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than
his master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense, the purblind
ambition, the stupid arrogance were the same in both, and the
difference was in a brute will that probably left the porter the
gentler man of the two. The very innocence of Lapham's life in the
direction in which he had erred wrought against him in the young man's
mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the
stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all
the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of
will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted
in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in
his shame than in his trespass. He said to himself that he was a
Corey, as if that were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his
heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which
seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission
in the end. It was almost with the girl's voice that it seemed to
plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his
indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to
give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices.
It WAS in Lapham's favour that he was so guiltless in the past, and now
Corey asked himself if it were the first time he could have wished a
guest at his father's table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was
not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly
where a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue. He asked
himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled
himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him the sympathy to
which such ABANDON had the right; and he had to own that he had met him
on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and asserting the
superiority of his sort, and not recognising that Lapham's humiliation
came from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon
him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.

He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to go
anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to f