able, and too
forcible to be forgotten. His hatred, however, if that be not much too
strong a name, was neither virulent nor hot, for it had no inverted
love to feed and embitter it. It was more a thing of his head than his
heart, revealing itself mainly in short, acrid speeches, meant to be
clever, and indubitably disagreeable. Nor did Hesper prove an unworthy
antagonist in their encounters of polite Billingsgate: what she lacked
in experience she made up in breeding. The common remark, generally
false, about no love being lost, was in their case true enough, for
there never had been any between them to lose. The withered rose-leaves
have their sweetness yet, but what of the rotted peony? It was
generally when Redmain had been longer than usual without seeing his
wife that he said the worst things to her, as if spite had grown in
absence; but that he should then be capable of saying such things as he
did say, could be understood only by those who knew the man and his
history.

Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain--parents with mean surroundings often give
grand names to their children--was the son of an intellectually gifted
laborer, who, rising first to be boss of a gang, began to take portions
of contracts, and arrived at last, through one lucky venture after
another, at having his estimate accepted and the contract given him for
a rather large affair. The result was that, through his minute
knowledge of details, his faculty for getting work out of his laborers,
a toughness of heart and will that enabled him to screw wages to the
lowest mark, and the judicious employment of inferior material, the
contract paid him much too well for any good to come out of it. From
that time, what he called his life was a continuous course of what he
called success, and he died one of the richest dirt-beetles of the age,
bequeathing great wealth to his son, and leaving a reputation for
substantial worth behind him; hardly leaving it, I fancy, for surely he
found it waiting him where he went. He had been guilty of a thousand
meannesses, oppressions, rapacities, and some quiet rogueries, but none
of them worse than those of many a man whose ultimate failure has been
the sole cause of his excommunication by the society which all the time
knew well enough what he was. Often had he been held up by would-be
teachers as a pattern to aspiring youth of what might be achieved by
unwavering attention to _the main chance_, combined with unassailable
hones