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For an instant a single instant he had found himself shrinking from the combat, and in the shock of self-contempt which followed 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.
Then, suddenly, he had reached out his hand for his mother's letter. A decision of great moment was impending. He would know what she had to say before finally making that decision. He wondered bitterly, grimly, whether her words would plunge him yet deeper in this abyss of self-hatred and self-contempt. MY DARLING," she wrote, "I am foolishly glad to learn that you are back at Naples.
Sitting in the bay window of the dining-room, he told Blix why he had come. "Oh, you were right!" she told him. "Always, ALWAYS come, when when you feel you must." "It gets so bad sometimes, Blix," he confessed with abject self-contempt, "that when I can't get some one to play against I'll sit down and deal dummy hands, and bet on them. Just the touch of the cards just the FEEL of the chips.
"I was," said Sylvia, curling her lip in biting self-contempt. "Well, that's a wholesome confession, anyway. O dear, how I do yawn! and Lent only half over. Sylvia, what are you staring at? Oh, I see." They had driven south to Washington Square, where Mrs. Ferrall had desired to leave a note, and were now returning. Sylvia had leaned forward to look up at Siward's house, but with Mrs.
He wandered aimlessly from one to the other, driven out of each in turn, consumed by the smouldering flame of his self-contempt. Scorn seemed written on the faces of the passers-by. As the day waned, he found himself once again for the twentieth time in the park, pacing in "the dim, persistent rain," which had been falling all day. But he could not get away from the distant roar of the traffic.
I confined myself to watching his mood without attempting unduly to influence him; and gradually I saw him so growing in grace that I would hardly have known him. I believe you will have the same difficulty, if God continues His work; especially in such wonderful humility, submission, diffidence, self-contempt, and desire to be nothing in the esteem and memory of men. Such he is at present.
'And then it depends much on the nature of one's work. Uttering these commonplaces with an air of reflection, he observed that they did not cost him the self-contempt which was wont to be his penalty for concession to the terms of polite gossip; rather, his mind accepted with gratitude this rare repose.
"Oh, not now," says Lady Rylton, who does not understand him, who could not, if she tried, fathom the depths of self-contempt that he endures, when he thinks of this evening's work, of his permitting this child to marry him, and give him her wealth for nothing nothing! What can he give her in return? An old name. She had not seemed to care for that to know the importance of it.
The certainty that his whole life hereafter must be one long act of treachery to Greif must overbalance everything else. That was the point of honour he had sought to explain. He thought he had been mistaken, and that his self-hatred and self-contempt had really but little to do with his decision.
It was a great shock and surprise to him to be forced to realise how far he had drifted on with the current, and how impossible it had become to get back to the old starting-place again, and in the knowledge he did not spare himself, but used harder and sterner words of self-contempt than any that are written here.
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