The whole lofty and beautiful structure of self-complacence upon which he had lounged, preening his feathers and receiving social triumphs and the adulation of his “less fortunate fellows” as the due of his own personal superiority, suddenly slipped from under him.  With a rueful smile at his plight, he said:  “The governor has called me down.”  Then, resentfully, and with a return of his mood of dignity outraged and pride trampled upon:  “But he had no right to put me up there—­or let me climb up there.”  Once a wrong becomes “vested,” it is a “vested right,” sacred, taboo.  Arthur felt that his father was committing a crime against him.

When he saw Adelaide and his mother their anxious looks made him furious.  So!  They knew how helpless he was; they were pitying him. Pitying him!  Pitying him!  He just tasted his coffee; with scowling brow he hastened to the stables for his saddle horse and rode away alone.  “Wait a few minutes and I’ll come with you,” called Adelaide from the porch as he galloped by.  He pretended not to hear.  When clear of the town he “took it out” on his horse, using whip and spur until it gripped the bit and ran away.  He fought savagely with it; at a turn in the road it slipped and fell, all but carrying him under.  He was in such a frenzy that if he had had a pistol he would have shot it.  The chemical action of his crisis precipitated in a black mass all the poison his nature had been absorbing in those selfish, supercilious years.  So long as that poison was held in suspense it was imperceptible to himself as well as to others.  But now, there it was, unmistakably a poison.  At the sight his anger vanished.  “I’m a beast!” he ejaculated, astonished.  “And here I’ve been imagining I was a fairly decent sort of fellow.  What the devil have I been up to, to make me like this?”

He walked along the road, leading his horse by the bridle slipped over his arm.  He resumed his reverie of the earlier morning, and began a little less dimly to see his situation from the new viewpoint.  “I deserve what I’m getting,” he said to himself.  Then, at a twinge from the resentment that had gone too deep to be ejected in an instant, he added:  “But that doesn’t excuse him.”  His father was to blame for the whole ugly business—­for his plight within and without.  Still, fixing the blame was obviously unimportant beside the problem of the way out.  And for that problem he, in saner mood, began to feel that the right solution was to do something and so become in his own person a somebody, instead of being mere son of a somebody.  “I haven’t got this shock a minute too soon,” he reflected.  “I must take myself in hand.  I—­”

“Why, it’s you, Arthur, isn’t it?” startled him.