Ralph carefully avoided all the fashionable thoroughfares; he felt degraded before himself, and he had an idea that every man could read his humiliation in his countenance.  Now he walked on quickly, striking the sidewalk with his heels; now, again, he fell into an uneasy, reckless saunter, according as the changing moods inspired defiance of his sentence, or a qualified surrender.  And, as he walked on, the bitterness grew within him, and he piteously reviled himself for having allowed himself to be made a fool of by “that little country goose,” when he was well aware that there were hundreds of women of the best families of the land who would feel honored at receiving his attentions.  But this sort of reasoning he knew to be both weak and contemptible, and his better self soon rose in loud rebellion.

“After all,” he muttered, “in the main thing she was right.  I am a miserable good-for-nothing, a hothouse plant, a poor stick, and if I were a woman myself, I don’t think I should waste my affections on a man of that calibre.”

Then he unconsciously fell to analyzing Bertha’s character, wondering vaguely that a person who moved so timidly in social life, appearing so diffident, from an ever-present fear of blundering against the established forms of etiquette, could judge so quickly, and with such a merciless certainty, whenever a moral question, a question of right and wrong, was at issue.  And, pursuing the same train of thought, he contrasted her with himself, who moved in the highest spheres of society as in his native element, heedless of moral scruples, and conscious of no loftier motive for his actions than the immediate pleasure of the moment.

As Ralph turned the corner of a street, he heard himself hailed from the other sidewalk by a chorus of merry voices.

“Ah, my dear Baroness,” cried a young man, springing across the street and grasping Ralph’s hand (all his student friends called him the Baroness), “in the name of this illustrious company, allow me to salute you.  But why the deuce—­what is the matter with you?  If you have the Katzenjammer [Footnote:  Katzenjammer is the sensation a man has the morning after a carousal.] soda-water is the thing.  Come along—­it’s my treat!”

The students instantly thronged around Ralph, who stood distractedly swinging his cane and smiling idiotically.

“I am not quite well,” said he; “leave me alone.”

“No, to be sure, you don’t look well,” cried a jolly youth, against whom Bertha had frequently warned him; “but a glass of sherry will soon restore you.  It would be highly immoral to leave you in this condition without taking care of you.”

Ralph again vainly tried to remonstrate; but the end was, that he reluctantly followed.

He had always been a conspicuous figure in the student world; but that night he astonished his friends by his eloquence, his reckless humor, and his capacity for drinking.  He made a speech for “Woman,” which bristled with wit, cynicism, and sarcastic epigrams.  One young man, named Vinter, who was engaged, undertook to protest against his sweeping condemnation, and declared that Ralph, who was a universal favorite among the ladies, ought to be the last to revile them.